Dropped poker typo domains

April 14, 2011 on 11:55 am | 2 Comments

For all you poker fans out there, these domains literally just dropped:

POKERSATRS.co.uk

POKRESTARS.co.uk

PARTYPOER.co.uk

PARTPYOKER.co.uk

POKERSTAS.co.uk

PKOERSTARS.co.uk

POERSTARS.co.uk

POKESRTARS.co.uk

POKEROROM.co.uk

POKEROROM.co.uk

POKERROMO.co.uk

Pokerstars, if you’re reading this, it might be a good idea to pick these domains up ASAP! Since pokerstars.com just got pinched by the feds. I’d like to go one day without hearing about the US attacking another country or deciding what’s best for the world. Yeah sure, Stars continued taking US gamers, just like most of the other big gaming sites. But hell, close their US bank accounts, arrest their US directors, block pokerstars.com access within the U.S but don’t take their domain which is used WORLDWIDE.

It looks like the FBI haven’t managed to grab pokerstars.co.uk. Hopefully if they try, Nominet will put up a fight and remind America that they don’t rule the whole world. I’d be hella pissed right now If I was Pokerstars. Look at their backlinks and you’ll get an idea of how much link budgets they’ve been going through. Even if they setup on a new domain, they’ve lost all that hard work!

Warning

This domain name has been seized by the F.B.I pursuant to an Arrest Warrant in Rem obtained by the United States Attoney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and issued by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Conducting, financing, managing, supervising, directing, or owning all or part of an illegal gambling business is a federal crime. (18 U.S.C 1955)

For persons engaged in the business of betting or wagering, it is also a federal crime to knowingly accept, in connection with the participation of another person in unlawful internet gambling, credit, electronic fund transfers, or checks. (31 U.S.C 3563 & 5366)

Violations of these laws carry criminal penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment and a fine of up to $250,000.
Properties, including domain names, used in violation of the provisions of 18 U.S.C 1955 or involved in money laundering transactions are subject to forfeiture to the United States. (18 U.S.C 981 & 1955(d))

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New Age of Google Search

With the new day comes the new year, and Google is determined to make this year the breaking point between quality and quantity. If you haven’t noticed, in the past few years every time you search for something on Google you get results filled with spam and bad quality sites whose only goal is funneling search visitors towards one marketing message and tricking them into clicking on their ads to make a few cents for the creator.

As an individual whose goal is to help others and not only make money I applaud Google on its recent announcement to finally clean up this spam infested web. More than 60% of today’s websites are spam, and this announcement could not have come at a better time.

The point that I am trying to make here is that if I am searching for “How to build a fence” I am not looking to buy one; therefore the first page of Google will not interest me because most of the first page is infected by websites that are trying to sell me the fence. Bob’s website that describes the whole process and has the best content, the one that I am looking for, is not listed on the first page but instead it’s listed on the 5th, 10th or beyond. By the time I find Bob’s page I already give up on building a fence myself and I just buy one.

So what is the problem here? The problem is that Bob who knows how to build a fence but does not know how to do SEO. He may be the best fence builder in the world and can explain the process in the smallest detail but he does not know what a Meta tag is, or how to research the keyword and his ideas never see the light of day. Those that know nothing about fences on the other hand know a lot about SEO and they are able to place their sites in front of Bobs.

The Google announcement offers some hope and promises that Bob will be able to deliver the message that I am looking for. According to Matt Cutts, Google is closer then ever at cracking down on spammers and he offers a few examples of what exactly Google is trying to do:

Google has developed 2 algorithm changes that focus on moving down low quality sitePlans to add an extension to Chrome for easy reporting of spam sitesPlans to improve the ability to detect hacked sitesCracks down on automated sites and autobloggs

The fact is its Googles fault the search engines are what they are today. Google invented SEO and it came back to bite them in the you know where. Prior to Google there was no spam, quality was more important. I’m not blaming Google for creating SEO because it created a brand new field of work but they need to find a way to fix what they have broken a decade ago. I have no doubt that they will find a way to fix things but they need to start thinking in a more natural way, rather then mechanic.

If we ever reach the point where the first result is the best result Google’s work will be done but we have a long way to go. What is encouraging is that Google was able to admit their mistake and is looking to change. How long that is going to take no one knows but at least they are moving in the right direction.

Goran Cobanovic is a web designer, SEO guru wannabe and WordPress addict. He is currently working as an accountant but uses all of his spare time to help and educate others about SEO and online marketing. If you feel like you need help with your website don't hesitate to ask.

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How to Make Money From Blockbusters

If you want to know how to make money you need to know where to look for it. The easiest way to find out where the money if is to follow the crowd. What I mean by that is you need to listen to the buzz going around, what people are talking about, what they are expecting to see or to get. Do you remember when the iPhone first came out, or the PS3, Xbox and all the other great products? Online marketers who took action made a lot of money from those products and you can do the same. Well such products don’t come out that often, maybe once per year or once every two years, but what comes out all the time are the movies. Twilight, The New Moon, Harry Potter on and on we go. Every year there are blockbuster movies that people get excited about and this is exactly what we are looking for, we are going to make money from blockbusters.

This does not involve any special knowledge but some free time, research and a small investment. What you want to do is Goggle “upcoming releases in 2010” or “upcoming movies in 2010” etc, get your own ideas here; you will get plenty of results from those terms.

Next you need to find a movie that you think is going to be a big hit and already you can tell what movies those are because they are already playing trailers in the movie theaters and on TV and you see and hear people talking about them. If you hear someone say “Oh I can’t wait to see that movie” you better do some research on it and see if it is going to be hot or not.

So after you have your movie you want to swing my Godaddy or any other domain site and purchase a domain that has a title of that movie in it. I bet you will find some good ones. The rest you already know. Build your site around the theme of that movie and when your favorite affiliate network ads a FREE offer regarding that movie you simply include that on your site. It might take a few months for the movie hype to start but once it does it’s money in the bank.

Goran Cobanovic is a web designer, SEO guru wannabe and WordPress addict. He is currently working as an accountant but uses all of his spare time to help and educate others about SEO and online marketing. If you feel like you need help with your website don't hesitate to ask. Tagged as: affiliate network, blockbusters, Google, how to make money, movies, online makreters

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Promoting Self Published Article

So you wrote a new article today, big deal. What are you going to do now? Readers are not going to just show up at your site and read it; you need to find a way to bring them to your new article that you are so proud off.

Today I’m going to answer the question so many people are asking; “How to promote self published article?”

When I first started my blog I wondered the same thing. Then I started reading what others were saying and used their strategies. After a while I started experimenting, even made my own “how to promote new article” checklist. I kept adding new things to the checklist as I discovered new ways to promote my site.

So this is the list that that I use to promote my new article after it was published.

Definition of a ping: ping is a notification sent to different services telling them that you published a new article.

If you are using WordPress you don’t have to worry about it, it’s done automatically. You can optimize which ping services you want to use but that’s up to you and I am not going to write about it today, you can Google it; it’s very simple to do.

If you don’t have WordPress you might have to do this manually. There are some nice pinging sites out there; I personally use pingler.com and pingomatic.com. I like these two pinging services, you may not, but there are plenty out there to choose from.

I’m not a big fan of social sites; I only use them to promote my articles. This however can be very effective if you have a lot of friends/followers. Google and Bing have finally discovered the importance of social sites so you should to. Not only that you will get better search results but you may get some traffic as well that might convert to leads, depending on what you are promoting.

This is the one that I have on my checklist that I don’t use. It is more for marketing/sales type of promotion than what I do but I know it is effective and will help some of you out. Of course you need to have a nice email list but that’s up to you to collect.

Facebook gives us new wonderful things every once in a while and tribes is one of those. Facebook tribes are currently hot so you should use it to your advantage, just search for your niche. This is a way to generate a nice backlink or two, not as much as getting the traffic that you need but we all know how important backlinks are.

This is also used to build backlinks, not as much for traffic but it gives a little of that too if done right. Some of the groups on FriendFeed have a high PR and they are pretty much open to your articles and backlink, just make sure you don’t spam.

There is a nice automated method for this and it is called “Share on FriendFeed widget”. This is of course for those like me that use WordPress, everyone else can eat their hearts out. I’m just kidding of course.

This is the one that I absolutely love. It is very easy to use and free. They have a subscription option as well but you don’t really need that unless you are a big time marketer.

Another great bookmarking serviced. Both of these have plugins for WP so they are very easy to use. It takes a little time to created a profile on each of the sites that they bookmark to but it’s worth the time. Tip: use your website name as your ID.

Well this is not a surprise is it? This is probably the most talked about article directory out there and it should be used for all your article submissions. No need to say more here.

What better way to gain followers than gaining their respect. Use the following blogging communities to meet people, talk about issues, post your articles, guest blog etc. There are to many benefits to list, you will have to discover them yourself.

Blogengage.comBizsugar.comBetterNetworker.comBloggersbase.comSERPd.comMyblogguest.com

The last one is my favorite. People are great, moderators help you with everything you need and if you guesblogg on someones site they help you promote it. It does not get any better than that.

Find a few blogs within your niche and become daily contributor. After you get “friendly” with the owner ask them to post your own articles that will link back you your own site. Most of the owners will agree if you can write and you get a linkback that you can link to your new article.

Promoting newly published articles is hard but with the right tools it can get a lot easier. Use this checklist and I guarantee you will have success. Add to it the things that you find helpful or remove those that you don’t like, but always use it. You may not see the results right away but if you keep doing it after 5 – 10 articles you will see a significant change.

Happy sharing!!

Goran Cobanovic is a web designer, SEO guru wannabe and WordPress addict. He is currently working as an accountant but uses all of his spare time to help and educate others about SEO and online marketing. If you feel like you need help with your website don't hesitate to ask.

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Thesis Theme 1.8 for WordPress

Lately I have been experimenting with different themes for this blog and could not quiet find the one that suits my taste. I found a couple that were visually pleasing to the eye, but were very slow. Than I’ve found a couple that were very fast but at the same time not attractive. Thesis Theme 1.8 for WordPress outperforms every theme that I have tried so far, both esthetically and performance wise.I think I have found what I have been searching for for the past couple of years.

Thesis theme itself has way to many options to list so I’m not even going to go into that, it’s best if you try it yourself. If you do not like the price, it’s not free, there are ways of getting it for free, just use your favorite search engine. If you still have trouble finding it contact me and I can point you in the right direction.

I’m going to write more about the Thesis Theme 1.8 for WordPress in the future but I first have to learn all that it has to offer. In the meantime you can let me know what you think and if you have a suggestion how to make it better.

Goran Cobanovic is a web designer, SEO guru wannabe and WordPress addict. He is currently working as an accountant but uses all of his spare time to help and educate others about SEO and online marketing. If you feel like you need help with your website don't hesitate to ask. Tagged as: Thesis Theme 1.8 for WordPress

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Guerilla Marketing

Guerrilla marketing was first introduced to the world by Jay Conrad Levinson and has since entered the popular vocabulary as well as marketing textbooks. Today, guerrilla marketing tactics are being taught all over the country, and beyond. So what is Guerrilla Marketing and how do we define it?

Unlike the conventional marketing where the budget defines the success, “guerrilla marketing” relies on marketing resources to achieve maximum impact. It requires minimal investment but can yield great results if used correctly and consistently. We can define guerrilla marketing as collection of creative techniques, tactics and street smarts to gain customers’ attention and achieve maximum results.

Guerrilla marketing examples are all over the place and they can be defined by one word; clever. The following are just a few examples that you can find by walking down the street.

Movie Kung Fu Panda Guerrilla Marketing Example

Photo Guerrilla Marketing Example

Radio Guerrilla Marketing Example

Photo Guerrilla Marketing Example

As you can see marketers use clever guerrilla marketing ideas to get their message across and have their ads noticed. You will not see these ads all over the place like you may see Coke, Nike or Victoria’s Secret, but these ads will make you remember them and will get you talking.

Another example of guerrilla marketing can be seen on the radio. How do you use guerrilla marketing on the radio? Well you use catchy song. An example would be that annoying “fillet of fish” song from McDonald’s that started on the radio than moved to TV, or 1-800 54-Giant. Those songs are so annoying but if you ask any person on the street if they can sing it for you guess what, they will know it. Of course McDonald’s and Giant Glass have more than enough capital not to have to use guerrilla marketing tactics but they do because those tactics work.

I call these guerrilla marketing weapons because they are used to combat the more powerful, more resourceful opponent. To beat that opponent you need to use unconventional strategies and weapons, in other words you need “guerrilla marketing weapons”.

Commitment – Any marketing program without commitment is going to fail, you can bet on that.Consistency – It goes hand in hand with commitment, you need to be consistent in your guerrilla marketing and never give up. Only then you will achieve the results that you are striving for.Patience – In a long run marathon runner always beats much faster sprinter. Patience is a virtue; use it to your advantage.Involvement – Being involved in your guerrilla marketing guarantees better results than if you gave the instructions and walked away. Remember that no one cares about you more than you do; be involved in your marketing.Confidence – Believe in yourself, it will increase all the points already mentioned.Content – Create something that other people will want. Great content requires extensive research and without it you can’t compete.Measurements – Measuring and analyzing the results will guarantee the best guerrilla marketing results.Implementation – You may know all these points, have them memorized in your brain, but if you don’t implement them you can forget about the success.

These are the “weapons” guerrilla marketers use to compete again more financially powerful opponents. If you use all these points in your marketing campaigns you are guaranteed not to fail, and if you use then consistently enough you will eventually prevail.

I hope I was able to shed some light on guerrilla marketing today. This is a subject worth writing about and I will come back to it soon with more ideas and examples.

Goran Cobanovic is a web designer, SEO guru wannabe and WordPress addict. He is currently working as an accountant but uses all of his spare time to help and educate others about SEO and online marketing. If you feel like you need help with your website don't hesitate to ask.

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Link Building Do’s and Don’ts in 2011

Learning SEO is really not that hard but claiming that you are an SEO guru is probably something that every one of us has done at least once in our lives; at least to a small kid on the street that asks us what we do. There are very few SEO gurus out there and what makes them gurus is the fact that they can keep up with ever-changing online environment that we deal with every day. So today I am going to scratch the surface of 2011 SEO changes and will talk about link building do’s and don’ts in 2011

Don’t trust anyone that tries to sell you 5k or 10k links for $10, it does not work. It use to work, 5-6 years ago but since than Google has evolved into search and eliminate machine. It can easily detect all those automated links and put them on ignore list. Money spent for nothing and it does not work in 2011.Profile links, forum posts, link wheels, social bookmarking, RSS feeds etc. don’t work anymore. I will use the same argument as I did in the first point, if it is easy to automate it is easy to detect therefore it is easy to eliminate and ignore. Don’t fall for those auto software’s anymore, they don’t work in 2011.Multiple links from the same domain/page don’t work in 2011. It hasn’t been working for a while; I don’t know why people are still doing this, especially all those people that use Xrumer and Scrapebox. Those things will ban your site, stay away from them.Manual link building always worked and will work in 2011 too. This is the best way to build your backlinks so just do it, it will help your site rank higher.Guest blogging is the best way to build manual backlinks because they are connected to the article and you can close any anchor text. This is especially great for long tail keywords.Manual submission to online leading directories. This will never change, not in 2011 not in the next 10 years. Online directories are way too valuable to ignore. Try to get into DMOZ, Ezilon, Yahoo and Bing directories. It’s hard to get in but once you do there is no way of stopping you.

One thing that I tell my readers is take pride at what you do and it will be much easier to do the work. If you care about the article you just wrote you will take 5 minutes out of your day to post your link somewhere where people will see it and will not use the software to spam 10k forum posts that no one will ever hear about. Link building in 2011 is different than it used to be; don’t be the one to ignore the change.

Goran Cobanovic is a web designer, SEO guru wannabe and WordPress addict. He is currently working as an accountant but uses all of his spare time to help and educate others about SEO and online marketing. If you feel like you need help with your website don't hesitate to ask.

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Google Standing up to Facebook, Launching +1

As you may have heard Google is standing up to Facebook and is launching its own “like button” in a face of Google +1 button, “pronounced plus one”. The idea behind Google +1 is to allow regular users to rate webpages or blogs if they see them as a great source of information for a particular subject or a keyword that they searched for. The button itself will be located right in Google search results, indicated below.

There is already talk about +1 plugin for WordPress which I think is a great idea. I am not so sure I dig Google +1 button on search engine results itself because they are very easy to abuse. That alone could have drastic affects on Goggle search engine results. I hope Google thought about that before they decided to go along with this.

Anyhow if you wish to know more about Google +1 button you can read more about it on search engine land website, they have a pretty extensive article about it. I’m sure I will be dedicating some time to it in the days and weeks to come as it is going to have an impact on how search engine works.

Do you think this is a good idea?

Goran Cobanovic is a web designer, SEO guru wannabe and WordPress addict. He is currently working as an accountant but uses all of his spare time to help and educate others about SEO and online marketing. If you feel like you need help with your website don't hesitate to ask.

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How SEO Works

It’s tough getting noticed on the Web. A Web page can provide useful information about a popular subject in an interactive and engrossing way, yet still attract few visitors. One of the most reliable ways to improve traffic is to achieve a high ranking on search engine return pages (SERPs).

A search for “skydiving” on Yahoo yields many results.
Where does your Web page rank, and how can you help it rise to the top?

Imagine that you’ve created the definitive Web site on a subject — we’ll use skydiving as an example. Your site is so new that it’s not even listed on any SERPs yet, so your first step is to submit your site to search engines like Google and Yahoo. The Web pages on your skydiving site include useful information, exciting photographs and helpful links guiding visitors to other resources. Even with the best information about skydiving on the Web, your site may not crack the top page of results on major search engines. When people search for the term “skydiving,” they could end up going to inferior Web sites because yours isn’t in the top results.

While most search engine companies try to keep their processes a secret, their criteria for high spots on SERPs isn’t a complete mystery. Search engines are successful only if they provide a user links to the best Web sites related to the user’s search terms. If your site is the best skydiving resource on the Web, it benefits search engines to list the site high up on their SERPs. You just have to find a way to show search engines that your site belongs at the top of the heap. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in — it’s a collection of techniques a webmaster can use to improve his or her site’s SERP position.

In this article, we’ll look at two SEO philosophies: the white hat approach and the black hat approach. We’ll also learn about some of the problems webmasters can encounter when trying to satisfy both the visitors to the site and search engines.

Experts in search engine optimization can tell you the steps you need to take in order to be one of the top entries on a SERP. In our example, you’ve already provided the most important component of SEO: excellent content. Without strong content, SEO tips and tricks will provide a temporary boost in your site’s ranking at best.

If you use your Web site to generate revenue, it’s crucial to grab a top spot in a SERP like this one for “skydiving” on Google. An SEO consultant can help you in your endeavor.

In an ideal World Wide Web, your site would rise to the top of every search engine’s skydiving SERP based on content alone. While it’s possible for your site to take the No. 1 SERP spot on its own, it could take months or even longer. Even worse, there’s no guarantee your skydiving site will ever make it as high as the first page of search results.

For some webmasters, site traffic isn’t that big a deal — their sites might be a personal project. But for anyone who uses the Web as a way to make money, it’s crucial. Whether the webmaster makes money by selling products on the site or through hosting Web advertisements, more visitors translates into more money. That’s why some large companies are willing to spend money on SEO consultants — they can be a worthy investment if the company’s site is ranked higher than competitor sites.

SEO techniques rely on how search engines work. Some are legitimate methods that are a great way to let search engines know your Web page exists. Other techniques aren’t good ways to get noticed and might involve exploiting a search engine so that it gives the page a higher ranking. Sometimes it’s tough to tell if an approach is legitimate. If it seems a little questionable, it’s probably a bad idea.

To improve a Web page’s position in a SERP, you have to know how search engines work. Search engines categorize Web pages based on keywords — important terms that are relevant to the content of the page. In our example, the term “skydiving” should be a keyword, but a term like “bungee jumping” wouldn’t be relevant.

Most search engines use computer programs called spiders or crawlers to search the Web and analyze individual pages. These programs read Web pages and index them according to the terms that show up often and in important sections of the page. There’s no way for a search engine spider to know your page is about skydiving unless you use the right keywords in the right places.

Here are some general tips about keyword placement:
• One place you should definitely include keywords is in the title of your Web page. You might want to choose something like “Skydiving 101? or “The Art of Skydiving.”
• Another good place to use keywords is in headers. If your page has several sections, consider using header tags and include important keywords in them. In our example, headers might include “Skydiving Equipment” or “Skydiving Classes.”
• Most SEO experts recommend that you use important keywords throughout the Web page, particularly at the top, but it’s possible to overuse keywords. Your skydiving site would obviously use the word “skydiving” as a keyword, but it might also include other keywords like “base jumping” or “parachute.” If you use a keyword too many times, some search engine spiders will flag your page as spam. That’s because of a black hat technique called keyword stuffing, but more on that later.

Keywords aren’t the only important factor search engines take into account when generating SERPs. Just because a site uses keywords well doesn’t mean it’s one of the best resources on the Web. To determine the quality of a Web page, most automated search engines use link analysis. Link analysis means the search engine looks to see how many other Web pages link to the page in question.

Going back to our skydiving example, if a search engine sees that hundreds of other Web pages related to skydiving are linking to your Web page, the engine will give your page a higher rank. Search engines like Google weigh the importance of links based on the rank of the linking pages. In other words, if the pages linking to your site are themselves ranked high in Google’s system, they boost your page’s rank more than lesser-ranked pages.

The Webcrawler search engine spider analyzes Web pages and indexes them according to relevance.

So, how do you get sites to link to your page? That’s a tricky task, but make sure your page is a destination people want to link to, and you’re halfway there. Another way is to offer link exchanges with other sites that cover material related to your content. You don’t want to trade links with just anyone because many search engines look to see how relevant the links to and from your page are to the information within your page. Too many irrelevant links and the search engine will think you’re trying to cheat the system.

Some people seem to believe that on the Web, the ends justify the means. There are lots of ways webmasters can try to trick search engines into listing their Web pages high in SERPs, though such a victory doesn’t usually last very long.
One of these methods is called keyword stuffing, which skews search engine results by overusing keywords on the page. Usually webmasters will put repeated keywords toward the bottom of the page where most visitors won’t see them. They can also use invisible text, text with a color matching the page’s background. Since search engine spiders read content through the page’s HTML code, they detect text even if people can’t see it. Some search engine spiders can identify and ignore text that matches the page’s background color.

Webmasters might include irrelevant keywords to trick search engines. The webmasters look to see which search terms are the most popular and then use those words on their Web pages. While search engines might index the page under more keywords, people who follow the SERP links often leave the site once they realize it has little or nothing to do with their search terms.

A webmaster might create Web pages that redirect visitors to another page. The webmaster creates a simple page that includes certain keywords to get listed on a SERP. The page also includes a program that redirects visitors to a different page that often has nothing to do with the original search term. With several pages that each focus on a current hot topic, the webmaster can get a lot of traffic to a particular Web site.

Page stuffing also cheats people out of a fair search engine experience. Webmasters first create a Web page that appears high up on a SERP. Then, the webmaster duplicates the page in the hopes that both pages will make the top results. The webmaster does this repeatedly with the intent to push other results off the top of the SERP and eliminate the competition. Most search engine spiders are able to compare pages against each other and determine if two different pages have the same content.

Selling and farming links are popular black hat SEO techniques. Because many search engines look at links to determine a Web page’s relevancy, some webmasters buy links from other sites to boost a page’s rank. A link farm is a collection of Web pages that all interlink with one another in order to increase each page’s rank. Small link farms seem pretty harmless, but some link farms include hundreds of Web sites, each with a Web page dedicated just to listing links to every other site in the farm. When search engines detect a link selling scheme or link farm, they flag every site involved. Sometimes the search engine will simply demote every page’s rank. In other cases, it might ban all the sites from its indexes.

Cheating the system might result in a temporary increase ivisitors, but since people normally don’t like to be fooled, the benefits are questionable at best. Who wants to return to a site that isn’t what it claims to be? Plus, most search engines penalize Web pages that use black hat techniques, which means the webmaster trades a short success for a long-term failure.

The biggest challenge in SEO approaches is finding a content balance that satisfies both the visitors to the Web page and search engine spiders. A site that’s entertaining to users might not merit a blip on a search engine’s radar. A site that’s optimized for search engines may come across as dry and uninteresting to users. It’s usually a good idea to first create an engaging experience for visitors, then tweak the page’s design so that search engines can find it easily.

Google’s Webmaster Help Center gives tips on credible SEO techniques to boost your site’s page rank.

One potential problem with the way search engine spiders crawl through sites deals with media files. Most people browsing Web pages don’t want to look at page after page of text. They want pages that include photos, video or other forms of media to enhance the browsing experience. Unfortunately, most search engines skip over image and video content when indexing a site. For sites that use a lot of media files to convey information, this is a big problem. Some interactive Web pages don’t have a lot of text, which gives search engine spiders very little to go on when building an index.
Webmasters with sites that rely on media files might be tempted to use some of the black hat techniques to help even the playing field, but it’s usually a bad idea to do that. For one thing, the major search engines are constantly upgrading spider programs to detect and ignore (or worse, penalize) sites that use black hat approaches. The best approach for these webmasters is to use keywords in important places like the title of the page and to get links from other pages that focus on relevant content.

Optimizing a site isn’t always straightforward or easy, which is why some webmasters use an SEO consultant. When relying on an SEO consultant, it’s important to check the consultant’s credentials, track record and client list. It’s also a good idea to stay as informed as possible about SEO issues — if the consultant recommends a black hat approach and the webmaster takes the advice, search engines might hold both parties accountable.

Many SEO firms are completely legitimate businesses that only follow the white hat optimization philosophy. They help webmasters tweak Web page layout, choose the right words to increase traffic, and help facilitate link exchanges between sites with complementary content. If you have a Web page that needs a little help, it’s a good idea to find someone who really knows how to leverage legitimate techniques to increase your page’s SERP ranking.

Strickland, Jonathan.  “How Search Engine Optimization Works.”  18 January 2008.  HowStuffWorks.com.  06 March 2010.

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.me.uk domain confusion

Welcome to the first post in my UK-Namespace category. This category will be used to look at the current state of the .UK domain space and provide statistics on the .UK space from a private database.

I wanted to start by looking at the confusion surrounding .me.uk domains.

Nominet requirements for registering a .me.uk domain:

The .me.uk SLD is intended to provide a personal namespace within the .uk Top Level Domain. Unless Rules 9.4 or 9.5 apply, registrants of .me.uk domain names must be, and remain at all times, natural persons (a “qualifying person?), and shall not be recorded on the register as being the agent, trustee, proxy or representative for any person or entity (whether having an individual legal personality or not) which is not a qualifying person.

Many people believe that these rules mean a .me.uk domain should be based on a persons name, for example – lesleycowley.me.uk – or that the domain could be anything (ie poker.me.uk) as long as it’s only used for personal purposes.

I believe a lot of the confusion surrounds an old requirement which has since been removed:

reasonably faithful representation of that person’s legal name

I too found the wording to be somewhat open to interpretation. And with so many .me.uk domains being used for commercial purposes(see left image), I decided to give Nominet a call* and get confirmation on the matter.

I was advised that a .me.uk domain can indeed be any combination of words (of course trademark rules etc still apply). So poker.me.uk is just as valid as lesleycowley.me.uk.

I was also advised that the domain can be used for business purposes as long as the domain is registered to an individual.

So there you have it. From the horses mouth

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Are your config files secure?

If you’re on a shared hosting server, you should be extremely careful to apply the correct permissions to your configuration files. Failure to do so, can leave them open to viewing by other users on the server. It’s then a trivial matter for the user to connect to the database server and modify posts. steal customer data and so on.

This problem isn’t new, but with more people relying on CMS systems such as WordPress, which use a standard config file, it’s a growing danger.

Your config file should have it’s permissions set to 600 to prevent other users on your server from reading the config file.

I’ve put together a proof of concept script which automatically searches for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and any other Generic config files and allows you to view them.

Note: It may be illegal to read other users config files, connect to their database and insert hidden links into their old WordPress posts. As such, only use this script on a server which is used exclusively to host your own websites.

Download: Insecure-Config-Search.php

Usage: Upload to your server and visit the script in your web browser. No config required!

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Auto-Hide Bookmark Toolbar in Google Chrome

In this article, I’ll explain a way that you can auto-hide (kinda) the bookmark toolbar in Google Chrome on Mac OS X. I personally like to use as few toolbars as possible in my browsers, since they eat up valuable screen real-estate. I’ve never really been a fan of the Bookmarks toolbar, but with my increased preference to use the HTTPS version of the sites I login to, I’ve began relying on the bookmarks toolbar to avoid accidentally visiting the non-HTTP version of a site.

In an ideal world, Google Chrome would have an option built in that would make the bookmarks toolbar appear when you hover just below the address bar and then disappear again when you move the mouse away. To be fair, you can show and hide the bookmarks toolbar pretty easily by using the Command+shift+B command.

In spotlight, search for, and run, the application ‘Automator’.

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1) Once Automator opens, select the ‘Service’ option and click ‘Choose’.

2) On the right side of the Automator window, change ‘Service receives selected’ from ‘text’ to ‘no input’ and change ‘in’ from ‘any application’ to ‘other>Google Chrome’

3) On the left side of the Automator window, scroll down the list of available actions and double click on ‘Run AppleScript’. An AppleScript window should then appear on the right side of the Automator application.

4) Delete everything in the AppleScript to the right and insert the following:

on run {input, parameters}
tell application "System Events"
tell application "Google Chrome" to activate
keystroke "b" using {command down, shift down}
delay 3 #Adjust this time delay to your preference. 3 seconds is enough for me
keystroke "b" using {command down, shift down}
end tell
return input
end run

5) Click File>Save As and then enter the name ChromeBMAutoHide

6) Open System Preferences, click on ‘Keyboard’ and then ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’. Click ‘Services’ on the left and then scroll down the options on the right side of the window until you spot your newly created service. Select the service and assign a shortcut key. For example Cmd+Shift+K

7) That’s it, you’re done! Now, when you’re in Google Chrome, you can press Cmd+Shift+K and your bookmark toolbar will appear for 3 seconds (or longer/shorter depending if you edited the script) and then automatically disappear after.

If anyone knows how to export the Automator Service file, please let me know! Then I can host it here and save people the trouble of having to go through the above steps. Thanks!

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Disguising a Facebook ‘Like’ link

The Facebook Like button allows people to share interesting sites they find, with their friends on Facebook. You can place a Like button on any web page and when a user clicks on it, a story appears in the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link back to your website.

Using some clever CSS, you can disguise the Like button to look like something else and trick people to click on the button

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Update: As a commenter pointed out. This does not work in Internet Explorer because it lacks support for pointer-events. It does work in Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

In the example button below, I’ve disguised the Like button to look like a button that might be used to move between different pages. If you click on it, you’ll be Liking my blog.

(If you don’t see the custom Like button above, go to the Facebook Like test page)

The result of clicking on the above customised Like button is a post going out to all my friends on Facebook letting them know I like http://www.esrun.co.uk

As yet, I haven’t found a way to redirect a user after they click, due to browser security policies on third party content loaded in iframes.

This code is ready to rock. Just swap out ‘href=http://www.esrun.co.uk’ with your own URL and replace the background URL for #fake_facebook_button in the CSS.

In the example below, I’ve again disguised the Like button. This time, when you click on it, not only will you be liking esrun.co.uk but you’ll also be redirected to the next page (for example sake, it redirects to Google).

Note: I’ve placed the sample button inside an iframe so you don’t get taken off this blog post. If you want to see it in use on a regular page then go direct to the Facebook XFBML Like test page

This code is ready to rock n’ roll. Just swap out fb:like href=”http://www.esrun.co.uk/blog/disguising-a-facebook-like-link/” with your own URL and replace the background URL for #fake_facebook_button in the CSS.

NOTE: Unlike the iframe method, with XFBML, if you want to capture and redirect the user when they click on the Like button then the domain where the button is hosted and the URL that the user is Liking must match.

For example I can put the Like button within this post and have people Like any page on esrun.co.uk but couldn’t make them Like a page on onlinehoster.com

There are also legitimate uses of the code above.

For example, if you operated an online store, you could offer a discount during the checkout process if the user ‘Likes’ your website. Instead of redirecting after the user clicks the button(as above), you’d fill in the discount box with your special code.

Another viral example would be making the Like button look like a play button below a new movie trailer. When the user clicks on the button, you’ll start the trailer (instead of redirecting the user, as above). Hell, you could even just use the real button instead of customising it and be upfront by telling the user that they need to click on it before you let them watch the trailer.

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DynaDot HTML table captcha

Although the captcha shown in the image to the left may appear like any other captcha, DynaDot are actually using a HTML table based captcha to defend against automated WHOIS lookups.

This works by splitting each character into multiple rows. Each row is it’s own table, with each cell (TD) set to a specific height, width and background color.

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This table based captcha is similar to the other HTML based captcha that I recently looked at. The differences in this case are that DynaDot use tables while the other one used a combination of DIVs and CSS and DynaDot also go one step further by adding colored pixels around each character and mixing up the colors used within the character itself. This is an attempt to make it harder to remove the colored characters from their white background and therefore harder to feed through OCR software.

The idea is good but need’s to be improved. Being HTML based, it slows down automators who use generic OCR software or those who outsource their captcha cracking to real humans (very cheap). Although I can’t say that it completely stops them, because they could still automate a headless browser to take a screenshot of the page, crop to the captcha and then treat it as a regular captcha image.

Regardless of the possibilities I mentioned above, the captcha itself isn’t strong enough to avoid being broken in it’s HTML form, as the code below demonstrates.

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HTML based Captcha

Someone on the WickedFire forums came across an interesting problem. He needed to automate the submission of data to a website which used a relatively simple looking captcha.

Usually for a simple looking captcha like this, you’d just feed the image straight through gocr which would output plain text. If the captcha is more complicated then you have to write your own OCR code.

This captcha however, is deceiving. It’s not actually an image. It’s a mishmash of HTML and CSS!

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This is the first time I’ve seen something like this. It’s actually quite a clever idea. Being pure HTML/CSS code, it’s impossible to feed it through an OCR package or even pass it through to a human based captcha cracking service.

Although the idea is quite clever, it definitely needs improvement. The captcha is made up of bold tags () which are set to be 1 pixel high/wide using CSS. Some tags have a coloured background and others don’t. This results in what looks like an image to the human eye.

The following script converts the HTML/css combo to a regular image, ready to be passed through gOCR or similar.

(Note: Since there’s consistant and equal spacing and no noise or distortion in the image, I’m sure that if you sat down and mapped out each character then you could probably convert the captcha to regular text without even converting it to an image and running it through OCR software.)

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Keep-Alive DoS Script

I spent some time reading through the HTTP protocol, for another project. After playing around, I discovered that even with very limited bandwidth, you can perform an effective denial of service(DoS) attack against a web server.

Back in the day, when botnets were a rarity and bandwidth came at a premium, most DoS attacks relied on tying up services (e.g Apache) with fake requests. It didn’t take long for software makers to adapt to these attacks and come up with effective filters.

Now days, the DoS attacks you read about in the news are usually distributed across thousands of computers and use pure brute force to wipe their target off the internet by sending so much traffic to the remote server that it simply has no bandwidth left to serve legitimate requests.

The good news is that there’s still a middle ground!

There are three components that make up this attack.

Keep-Alive is part of the HTTP/1.1 protocol and allows you to send many requests during one connection (usually no more than 100). This is good for two reasons. Firstly, you can flood a remote server with tonnes of requests without triggering a firewall defence based on the amount of connections you’ve opened to the server. Secondly, there’s an overhead with every connection you open, only having to open 1 connection means you can make the most of your limited bandwidth.

When your browser loads a webpage, it usually sends a GET or POST request to the remote server. The server will act on the request and return the data to your browser. If you’re performing an attack against a remote web server, the last thing you want is to receive the output for every request you make! You’ll run out of bandwidth long before you manage to cause any problems for the web server. The solution? Use HEAD instead of GET/POST. This will cause the web server to action your request in exactly the same way but not return the data to you.

This attack is based on eating up the remote servers CPU and RAM, not out gunning them with bandwidth. You need to target your requests at a resource intensive page. For example, the search function of a blog or forum can create quite a load on the server while it scans through the database looking for your request. If you do target a search feature then you should randomise your search terms so that the server doesn’t benefit from any caching it may have implemented.

I threw together a DoS script based on the above 3 factors and aimed it at a US VPS server I have. It’s a clean install of Ubuntu with a fresh copy of WordPress installed. I targeted a search page on the blog.

Chart 1 - 3G Connection - 1000 requests (10 sequential connections, 100 requests per connection). Increases CPU usage to 25%

Chart 2 - 3G Connection - 5000 requests (50 sequential connections, 100 requests per connection). Increases CPU usage to 65%

Chart 3 - DSL Connection - 1000 requests (10 sequential connections, 100 requests per connection). Increases CPU usage to 96%

DSL Connection - 5000 requests (50 sequential connections, 100 requests per connection). I wasn't able to collect the statistics for Chart 4 because the attack caused the server to freeze up within about 20 seconds. I grabbed this screenshot before it died.

The next test was to see what the script could do to a beefy shared hosting server. The server in question has 8 cores, each running at 2.27GHz and the machine is equipped with 62GB of RAM.

Chart 5 - DSL Connection - 5000 requests (50 sequential connections, 2 second delay between connections, 100 requests per connection). Increases CPU usage to ~85%

In this test, I added a delay between connections to string out the attack for a longer period of time. You’ll notice that the traffic doesn’t die back down to it’s original value like the other charts. This is due to the server becoming unresponsive during the attack which prevented me from continuing collecting stats. The server recovered about 120 seconds after the attack had stopped.

Now don’t go thinking you’re going to take down Paypal.com from one computer with a 3G internet connection. But taking down a single VPS/Dedicated server using your DSL connection? Yes, it’s doable.

This method is especially effective against busy servers, such as shared hosting servers. They’re usually overcrowded and don’t require much to topple over. If your connection isn’t fast enough to completely deplete the servers resources and topple it in one hit, you should consider lowering the amount of requests but keeping the attack going for as long as possible. It wont take long before your requests, combined with the backlog of genuine requests. bring the server to a grinding halt.

This is quite a difficult attack for a server to detect and block automatically since it looks similar to legitimate traffic. A modern web browser loading a page with a lot of components could quite easily make the same number of requests, in the same style, as this attack would.

Remember that during my tests, I opened only ONE connection at a time. You could easily launch a few instances from one machine and still fly under the radar with regards to firewalls and Apache protection.

You can download Keep-Dead.php which is a functional script demonstrating the power of the above concept. Open the script in a text editor and adjust the top configuration options  Although Keep-Dead is primarily meant to be launched from the command prompt, it can also be uploaded to a regular shared hosting plan and launched through the web browser.

The script uses a single socket at a time, to fly under the radar. You could likely launch 3-4 instances of the script and still avoid automated protection against the attack.

I recommend watching the video in full screen so that you can clearly see the live stats of the remote server which is being attacked (top right). You can also see how little bandwidth is used in the 3G connection monitor (top left). Considering how quickly the CPU spiked and the RAM was depleted, I could most likely have performed the attack while using even less bandwidth.

This video shows the before and after of an attack on a WordPress site being served by Nginx.

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Using Zero Facebook as a proxy

In May 2010, Facebook (in collaboration with many mobile/cell service providers) launched 0.facebook.com – a completely free to access, mobile version, of Facebook.

There are absolutely no data charges applied when surfing 0.facebook.com! Unfortunately it is a somewhat limited experience considering it doesn’t allow access to any pictures. You can still post status updates, comments, messages and so on.

I planned to go the whole hog and create a fully working proxy which uses 0.facebook.com to funnel the traffic through. The plan was to develop a server app and a client app which runs on the cell phone. Eventually, however, I settled on a simpler, proof of concept, proxy.

There’s a Facebook note which is constantly monitored and updated based on user comments. For example, if you comment *bbc then the note is updated automatically with the contents of the BBC news feed. If you enter japan then the note is automatically updated with the contents of the Japan Wikipedia page.

(The reason I chose to use notes/comments instead of private messages is because of overly restrictive limits Facebook applies to the number of private messages you can send in a short period of time.)

To use the proxy, you simply bookmark a notes page of a user who’s account is being constantly monitored by a remote server, via the Facebook graphs API. Each time you add a comment to that note, the remote server reads it, collects the information you want and then updates the note with that information.

Now, to proxy requests through 0.facebook.com, you simply visit the bookmarked page and add a comment.

For example, if I want to see the Wikipedia page for Osaka (Japan) then I’ll add a comment to the note page which reads: osaka

After a second or two, you can refresh the page and see that the note has been updated with Wikipedia data about Osaka.

If you had the time and know how, you could easily use this same method to create a fully functioning proxy, allowing you to surf any website for free by funnelling the data through 0.facebook.com.

You’d need to create an application to run on the cell phone which looks like a normal browser but actually makes requests for pages via Facebook comments and receives the data for those requests by reading a Facebook note.

Since development for cell phones isn’t really my thing,I haven’t taken the time to do this. If anyone out there develops cell phone applications (especially for Nokia phones) and want’s to take this to the next level, send me an email!

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An Intriguing Story About Black Hat, DDOS Attacks, The White House, Terrorists And The CIA

Later that night Mr Blue Hat SEO decided to piss off the stupid kids of the syndk8 crew…

Fuck it, he thought. Not like any real spammer will give a shit about this post anyways, the guys who can crack a captcha read my blog as pure entertainmet. That’s if they are not busy hacking some government or edu site, lol. Anyways, I’ll be a drama queen about it, and post the info. This might even turn out as a nice linkbait and have some fun in the process.

Read the whole story as it develops.

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Black Hat Skills to Make Money Online

What skills do you need to make money online using Black Hat SEO?

There may be overlap between some of the skills in the list below, but if you have all of these in your toolbox, you have the potential to become a successful Black Hat SEO:

Technical skills:

PlanningOrganizationFinanceSystem modellingReverse engineeringAnalyticalLogicalCreative

Life skills:

Self confidenceSkepticismCuriosityIngenuityStubbornnessGenerosityIron proof work ethics

I’ll follow up this post describing each of these skills and the role they play in your money making ventures.

Do you think I missed anything important?

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Create Your Own Amy Winehouse

(Most) SEOs are leeches. We identify phrases with popularity and then push content to the top of the search engine listings for these phrases.

Some people build their own buzz and create search volume for phrases that didn’t have any before.

Knowing how to generate both visibility and popularity for relatively unknown phrases can take you from being an SEO leech to becoming a marketing genious.

If the clock went back one time and you were hired by an underground record label to promote Amy Winehouse online. What would you do?

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Do You Want To Learn The Dark Side Of Affiliate Marketing?

If you do, you should spend a few years learning PHP, SEO, SEM, researching affiliate networks and how they work. Not easy, but the payoff makes it worth it.With a clear focus and a set mind I reckon you can be making the good dollars after 2 or 3 years.Or you can start today by joinin WPBlackhat.

My friends Brad and Darkseo have been working together developing this kick ass tool. This is what Brad has to say about it in his blog:

The tools include the BH Plugin, CPA Redirector 2.0, semi-automated do-follow-blog commenter, parasite page generator, etc. Tons of downloads: incentive pages, squeeze pages, mini-review-site templates, etc.Private membership site: total support and no BS advice to help members achieve their revenue goals (hundreds of dollars a day or more) from the dark side of affiliate marketing.Our membership cap is around 200, once we reach that the doors will close.No sales page and no hype – join and you’ll see    

If you are serious about making money online you could seriously benefit from these tools and the guidance they provide in the forums. I’ll visit the forums every now and then so if I can help you with anything let me know.P.S. haven’t posted for a while, I’ll post again soon letting you know what I’m up to.

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Link Building In A Breeze

My friend Darkseo partnered with Busin3ss. Only good things can come of this union.

These two gentlemen came up with Blog Farm Explosion.

Now, I quitted developing blog farms ever since social bookmarking and tagging came along. Especially since Google got pretty good at unveiling link schemes that lived in same IP ranges. I just didn’t feel like buying one of those SEO Host packages with multiple C Blocks, and installing all those blogs and covering all the footprints. It seemed like work

This is different though. Blog Farm Explosion is about getting content embedded links from thousands of domains and IPs, C Blocks with almost no effort involved.

The tool posts content to WPMU enabled websites, creating a wordpress blog, posting content and links. The features are great and they keep improving it with user feedback.

If you need a fast, easy and automated way to build links to your domains this could be a winner for you. I am not placing any ref links or anything here, and the only thing I’m getting out of this post is the priviledge of recommending a good product that I know can improve the ranking capability of any of your pages. Will it make money for you? If you know a thing or two about SEO and Monetization, yes, for sure.

Thanks Brad for pointing out the limited time discount offer.

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Black Hat Skill 1 – Organization (Post 1 of 15)

Not having good organizational skills is incompatible with being a successful black hat SEO. I would argue that is even more important than knowing anything about search algorithms in the first place. In this post I will hopefully show you why.

The purpose of this series is to knock down some of the stereotypes around black hat SEO and the skills you need to develop to become a successful one.

Most people have the wrong impression about black hat search engine optimization. They think that if they can get access to a bunch of well kept secrets, they will suddenly get flooded with traffic and sales. Guess what, aint gonna happen.

Doesn’t matter how much you know about google’s algorithms, and how to manipulate them. You still have to take ideas into actions. The traffic and the sales will come after a lot of implementation, testing, tweaking and hard work.

That said, I believe Organization is one of the key skills that you need, yet often overlooked.

Black Hat Skill Number 1: Organization

Dealing with thousands of username/passwords and login details is not an easy task. You need a strategy to deal with such amount of information, as well as making sure you are not building a footprint that connects a big chunk of your web properties with each other.

As the managing director of your Black Hat SEO business, you need to think about the following challenges, and come up with a strategy to manage them successfully:

Where do you keep your domain registration information?

How do you make sure you don’t let domains expire accidentally?

How do you make sure your cashflow accounts for all those domain and hosting renewal bills?

How do you ensure you don’t link between sites in neighbour IP ranges?

Does your link building strategy mimic natural patterns?

Do you know what to do tomorrow? Next week? Do you have a list of tasks you need to work on?

How do you manage your contractors? How do you keep in touch with them? Do you brief them properly? Do you pay on time? Do you provide feedback when needed? They are a key part of your business, so you should have a strategy to manage them and improve the quality of their output on an ongoing basis.

Do you work on several projects at one time? How do you make sure you follow through on everything you start? Doing 85% of the job is usually not enough. You need to follow through and tick all the boxes to get the traffic and sales coming.

Once a project is rolled out, how do you maintain it? Do you have an ongoing conversion optimization strategy? Optimizing that landing page to improve conversions may bring you a lot more revenue than starting all over again on a new set of web properties.

How much are you spending? Do you keep a track? Do you have a planned budget? Can you tell apart your fixed costs from your variable costs? The fact that you have a high margin and you are making good money does not excuse you from being a louse administrator. We’ll get back to Financials on another post, since I believe it is a key skill for your business.

When you learn something, what do you do about it? Do you keep a repository of ideas and lessons learned? I can guarantee that you won’t remember everything you thought about or learn about 18 months from now. Take control of your knowledge and manage it properly, make it tangible and let it become an asset you will use to make more money.

Can you list everything you need to run your business? Do you know how much time/money each of those elements cost? Do they require ongoing management? If you can’t answer this, who can?

I think I could keep listing challenges that can only be managed through efficient organizational skills. Hopefully by now you are realizing that running a business based on black hat seo techniques is not about being a whiz kid and running some evil scrips and collecting the bill at the end of the month.

Where do you think you stand in all of this? Do you treat your business with enough organization?

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How To Build Links (No BS)

As you know, getting the on-page factors right is merely 5-15% of the game. Push this number up or down depending on the competitiveness of the keyword you are targeting.

Building links is usually the big bottleneck for webmasters and SEOs. Yes sure I could create great content with viral qualities, and spend a zillion of time in social media websites connecting with people who might link to me some time. But you and I know that most of the sites we build links for are not that great, and they sure as hell aint viral.

What options are we left with? Paid links? Directory submission? 3 way link exchanges? Web 2.0 properties? Forums?

Sure, all of the above. There is a right place for everything, and there is a perfect place for what I am about to show you.

Link Farm Evolution allows you to:

Pick Any of the 7523+ WPMU & Pligg Hosts to Put Your Links on (how’s that for IP spread?)Fill out Registration Forms Without Ever Seeing Them (how’s that for automating repetitive tasks?)Post to Blogs, Submit News Stories and Comment (how’s that for keeping your link network alive and working for you?

I think wherever the word ‘farm’ is associated with ‘links’, the perception is that of a clumsy footprint-building tool that is going to get misused by the get-rich-quick hordes and fast track their way to failure.

This is not the case with LFE.

It’s a complex tool that requires a decent amount of dedication and if used properly it can become an important piece of the puzzle of a comprehensive link building strategy. Sure, white hat nazis won’t like it, but what do we care what they think?

Check out this space for more on Ling Farm Evolution. I will be posting more about it and I’m sure you’ll be interested in what I have to say.

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What Is Keeping You From Making Money

If you read my last post correctly you should start realizing by now that the technical skills that you need to make money online using seo techniques are more generic than specific.

You don’t need to be a copywriter

You don’t need to be a programmer

You don’t need to be a network whiz

You don’t need to be an interface/graphic designer

You don’t need to be a search algorithm expert

Even if you had all those skills yourself, you would need to organize your own time and make sure you deliver what you need to deliver in order for your project to come together. In this case your major expense would be time.

So if you don’t have ALL of those skills (like most of us) you will need support from someone else. So you will have two major expenses: time and money.

Welcome to the world of business: you can’t do everything by yourself, your job is to make sure you identify what needs to get done, and find the way to get it done.

“I can’t do it myself” and “I can’t afford to hire contractors” are two excuses that will take you nowhere.

So start by creating the list of tasks of everything that needs to get done for your current project to come alive. Then make sure you either allocate enough time for yourself to get it done, or that you have enough cash for contractors to fill the gaps.

If lack of investment equity is your problem, sounds like you need a business plan and an investor. Watch out for a future post on Black Hat SEO and Financial Skills.

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Howdy Spammers

Almost a year after my last post, it’s scary how fast time goes by.

SEO de Janeiro was the shit, though I’m late to report it Got to know some great dudes and was part of some very cool discussions.

This was a very busy year, which partly explains why I haven’t been blogging.

Lots of things have changed… for example:

Everyone is tweetingEveryone is using thesisEveryone got their adwords account bannedEveryone knows what a flog is (which explains previous bullet point)There is Bing now… watch out

Some things, however, don’t change.

For example, the good news is that Google can still be spammed. Don’t believe what you read or hear, black hat still works, as long as you master the art of making black look white. The old days of throwing mud against the wall and watching your adsense account go wild are long gone. Google’s efforts to get rid of spam separated the boys from the men and made us think like marketers, regardless of the color of the hat we wear.

Sorry for not posting for so long. I saw some old comments asking me stuff. Apologies but I had to delete them all because it was too chaotic to manage. Feel free to leave a comment again if you want to ask me anything, as I will be checking often now.

Next week I’m heading to Pubcon Vegas. If you are going there hit me up with an email or drop a comment and we’ll get together for a beer or many.

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