It probably is, there are hundred of thousands of Wordpress web sites that don’t have Akismet installed. I once won a casino-related SEO contest just by blog spamming millions of sites. I actually ended up taking 8 of the first 10 spots so yes, it’s really effective.

Earlier this week I was thinking of another way to use Wordpress as a spam tool. Re-writing Wordpress URL’s is relativily simple, how about re-writing every word/category to it’s own sub domain? With the use of a couple of RSS feeds you could generate thousands of sub domains in an instance. Re-using the feeds of your first spam blog you could generate a network of linked spam sites in a matter of minutes. It’s do-able, but what would be the impact?

Let’s say you have the ability to use wild-card sub domains. Then all you need to do is get Wordpress to re-write internal links to http://blog-post.category.example.com. With a little more effort it could be even better: http://silly.blog.post.category.example.com. Feed each install a couple of thousand messages through RSS and you’d have the ultimate killing scraper. Re-feed the RSS messages from the first scraper into the second, aggregate the feeds from the first and the second in your thirth scraper and you have an entire network.

Sounds crazy, but it would work. Easy, actually. Who’s up for a little coding..?

So how did I get it? Just plain old luck I guess, even though Android was announced november 2 I didn’t register it untill the fifth.

I set up a small web site earlier today, now all I have to do is wait and hope for Google to brand Android and not one of the other members of the Open Handset Alliance (there are over 30, so it’s not just Google).

Drupal 6

Google Android is my first encounter with the latest Drupal 6 (Beta 3). My first impression is that it has become easier to set up a site (the installation is a breeze). However, the menu module is still a bit of magic to me. Even though it has better core integration then previous versions.

First of all Google ignoring robots.txt files using a wildcard as user-agent. Netters (Dutch) posted about this earlier. Google indexed over 200k result pages of the @home search engine. Even though they’ve added the directory to their robots.txt. There’s plenty of other domains with the exact same behaviour.

Second is Google showing the same URL twice in their results. Take a search for new york hotels for instance. Nycetourist.com is both on the first- (#2) and second (#11) page. Many other search queries show (even multiple) duplicate listings, too.

Offcourse, there’s a lot more buggy stuff going on but I’d like to keep things to myself for a while before I publicize it :-)

An AdSense account does not exist for this login, as it is associated with an unapproved application., search your email to find the disapproval or account closure message we sent you for more information.

That sucks! Especially since this was my largest account (I have multiple) making a couple of thousand dollars each month. True, it was also the most shadiest of my accounts but still, it sucks…

I never received the mail Google referred to but luckily one of the Adsense account managers could quickly inform me that they will pay me the outstanding balance. Thank God ’cause that was a couple of thousand dollars, too.

Reveiling my Adsense tricks
Since I am moving towards a more “white hat” business model I am planning on stopping spam. For the Dutchies amongst you: I will be posting my Adsense tricks online in the next couple of weeks on Netters.

Disclaimer: This blog has had only about 500 visitors since I started it last Saturday so you may want to consider if I am really the right person to listen to…

We all blog for certain reasons: to express ourselves, to share a passion or just to make money. Whatever your reasons may be, we all blog to be heard. And for that you need an audience. In this post I’d like to show you how I got those 500 people to my blog, and what I am going to do to get even more.

First step: Make your blog Search Engine Friendly
This is one you can’t do without. Once you’ve been up and running for a couple of weeks search engines (Google) are likely to deliver at least 50 percent of your website’s traffic. With most blog-software (like Wordpress, Textpattern or Expression Engine) search engine friendliness comes standard. All you need to do is turn on those pretty URLs and you’re done.

Second step: Feed synchronization
If your blog is up and running the next step is to submit your RSS (or Atom) feed to services like Technorati and Google blogsearch. There are many other services but personally I don’t think they’re worth the effort. Eventually you may want to consider adding an XML-sitemap to your website.

Third step: Directory submission
Whatever you may have heart, directories can still be valuable. Don’t expect tons of traffic but do it mostly for the backlinks, those links eventually make you rank in Google. Every now and then you might stumble upon a directory that actually sends you visitors (a friend’s directory sent me 25 visitors today). You can submit your site to all those directories by hand but it’s a lot faster to use a submission service.

Don’t submit your site to DMOZ or the Yahoo directory (yet). Changes are very slim that they’ll list a new site. It’s better to wait a couple of months, create a lot of valuable content in the meantime, and not to upset the editor.

Fourth step: Use social media sites
There are plenty of so-called “Social Media Sites” like Digg and Stumble upon. Write a great article, submit it to these social media sites and have a couple of friends vote for your article. If you make it to one of the front pages it’ll get you tons of traffic. If not, write a better article and try it again ;-)

Fifth step: Reply to other blogs
There are probably hundreds (if not thousands) of other blogs about the same topic which you can find through services like Technorati. Let them know you exist by replying to their posts (with your link). Try to actually write meaningful replies, the chance of someone clicking your link are a lot bigger if they are triggered by your reply. Don’t care to much if a blog adds “nofollow” to a link, if your reply was good enough the author might link to you in future postings.

Sixth step: Appear as “guest author”
The best way to build a name is to write for blogs that have more readers then yours. You can either ask up front or just send them an article. Don’t worry if they don’t post it, you can always use it for your own blog.

Seventh step: Ask for links
Once your somewhat of an established author it becomes easier to just ask for links to your website. Send them an e-mail and see what happens, if they want a link back you can always add their site to your “blogroll”.

Eight step: Submit your site to DMOZ & Yahoo
Be the time you reach this step you have probably built a well read, quality content weblog. If you have then now is the time to submit your site to DMOZ and the Yahoo directory. Search the directories to find the best suited, well edited category. Don’t sweat it if it takes a while, DMOZ can take up to six months to get you listed. Be patient, you will get there eventually…

Up until now I have been tracking feedreaders with self built add-ons for Stuffed Tracker. It works but it gets noway near the slick stats Feedburner provides you with. So for DutchSEO I decided to give Feedburner another go.

Looking around a little in the admin area I saw “Mybrand“. And that’s exactly what I always wanted, to be able to publish my feeds on my domain, and have users subscribe to my feeds on my domain. All you need to do is add a CNAME record pointing at Feedburner and you’re done.

feeds CNAME feeds.feedburner.com

That’s all, that’s brilliant, that’s something they should have done ages ago…

And if I ever decide to drop Feedburner I can just change the Vhost and redirect the subdomain to anywhere I want.

By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the ‘http://’ onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.

It does sound stupid doesn’t it? Buy a domain to only use a subdomain. But is it really? The painfull truth is that most people are stupid (or ignorant for that matter)…

I’ve been testing a little with a couple of my “no-www” domains and apparantly approximately 20% of all natural homepage links point to www.domain.com. even though it’s redirected to the non-www equivalent. That leaves us with one question: are redirected links less valuable then direct links?

I believe they are, Google (and most large search engines for that matter) keep so called “link profiles” containing data like age of a link, target page and much more. It does look like the value of these link-profiles isn’t transferred, even if there’s a 301 permanent redirect. I know for a fact that Yahoo doesn’t (I have a domain ranking top 10 for a very competitive keyword, even though it’s been redirected for over 9 months).

So the next time you launch a new website you may want to consider using it anyway, even though it looks less cool…

Update with example
Take CssMania for example (the first one I found after publishing this post). Sure, they have over 50k links pointing to http://cssmania.com but another 10k+ pointing to http://www.cssmania.com. That’s one in five.

There are basically three options to get your scraped content:

• Ripping of entire pages
• Scraping RSS feeds
• Scraping SERP pages

My favorite is scraping SERP pages, this will get you guaranteed relevant pages with a nice keyword-density. To demonstrate how you can do this I modified the Google script. For the search results I use Mihalismsearch’s XML feeds (unlimited queries!).

I hacked all the irrelevant stuff out of the Google script (demo: Dutch SEO) leaving just a SERP page with nice titles and heading. If you’re planning on using it yourself you may wanna consider hacking out the links as well.

Next up: URL rewriting. The URLs you really want for your scraper are someting like this. Just add the following code to your .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)\.html$ /xmlsearch/?query=$1 [L]

Now you’re pretty much done except for a nice “little” keywordlist. I prefer Keyword Elite or Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. Create links to the scraped content pages and you’re done.

Ah, before I forget. You can download the demo package here offcourse.

That’s somewhat disappointing. True, it wasn’t a very prominent link and the article wasn’t the best I’ve ever written but still. With an Alexa traffic of nearly 1,000 and 317 feedreaders according to Feedburner (just the YouMoz section) I’d expected a little more. I’ll probably try again somewhere next week, maybe a “White Hat” style article attracts more attention.

Besides SEOmoz Sphinn might be worth a shot. Most articles hit the frontpage with 10+ votes, which sounds pretty doable. Other than that I have to re-start networking. Since it’s in English now my usual network is pretty much useless. I feel so “nude” with only 25 people having visited this blog :-’(

Then there’s marketshare, talking about search engines over here means talking about Google. Google has a whopping 96 percent marketshare. Yahoo is pretty much non-existent and MSN/Live is only used by kids and people who don’t know how to change Vista’s default search engine. There are a couple of other, local engines but I don’t know any SEO paying attention to them.

Another issue is Belgium, about half of the Belgians speak Dutch and thus making it an interesting audience. But ranking in the Netherlands doesn’t mean ranking in Belgium as well… That said, because of the Dutch’ international orientation a lot of Dutch people search for English terms. So you’re pretty much obligated to handle a multi-country/language strategy.

Ranking for competitive search terms in the Netherlands is a lot easier. Even though more then 80% of the Dutch population uses the internet there’s still only about 17 million of us. And accordingly a lot less webpages to compete with.

But most of all being a Dutch SEO is fun. Because of our experience in local optimization and our international orientation we not only get to work with Dutch, German, French, Polish and Spanish clients, but many US clients as well. To me it almost feels like having the best of both worlds :-)