Seocracy.com

New Datapresser Site Tracker Video

My buddy Alex over at Baldizzle.com took some time to create a great demonstration video of Datapresser's Site Tracking capabilities.

I thought I'd take a second to post it here for you all to see.

Enjoy!

BTW: Alex does great video work. He's one of the most talented and reasonably priced video producers I've worked with.

I Could Be Anything

So today I had this idea for a little mini site that parses twitter updates, called I Could Be Anything.

I Could Be Anything monitors the Twitter public timeline and looks for messages that can be appended to the words "I am".

Back when I was doing my degree, I used to create alot of work that involved typography and poetry, so this was a fun little site to build. I played around alot with how to filter out certain stop words (he, she, etc), and punctuation marks, also I discovered that typically if a sentence fragment has more than four words between "the" and a punctuation mark, it won't make sense when appeneded to "I am".

Anyways, this might all seem pretty mundane, but it makes for great research. Twitter provides unlimited data for me to work with, and whenever I have time, I'll continue tweaking and trying to perfect the filters.

Fun with String Permutations

So, I've been kicking around some new concepts for Datapresser's Content Generation, based on something called String Permutations.

For example, lets say I had four word groups:

- pronouns (my, your, his, her, our)

- subjects (goat, sailboat, cabin)

- conjunctions (is, is usually, is always)

- adjectives (stinky, leaking, clean)

By analyzing all the possible permutations of these 4 word groups, we can see exactly how much content we can spin from it, and what all the possible permutations are.

In this case, there are 135 possible permutations:

my goat is stinky
my goat is leaking
my goat is clean
my goat is usually stinky
my goat is usually leaking
my goat is usually clean
my sailboat is usually leaking
my sailboat is usually clean
our cabin is always leaking
our cabin is always clean
etc...etc....etc.....

The possible applications of string permutation become apparent when you consider a real-world example, like creating headlines:

So You Want To Meet a Girl
So You Want To Get A Date
So You Want To Ask Out A Woman
So You Want To Ask A Woman Out
So You Want To Get Started Dating
Learn How To Meet a Girl
Learn How To Get A Date
Learn How To Ask Out A Woman
Learn How To Ask A Woman Out
Learn How To Get Started Dating
Find Out The Way To Meet a Girl
Find Out The Way To Get A Date
Find Out The Way To Ask Out A Woman
Find Out The Way To Ask A Woman Out
Find Out The Way To Get Started Dating
It's Easy To Learn How To Meet a Girl
It's Easy To Learn How To Get A Date
It's Easy To Learn How To Ask Out A Woman
It's Easy To Learn How To Ask A Woman Out
It's Easy To Learn How To Get Started Dating

When I first started analyzing the possible permutations of some of my madlib scripts, I was so astounded by the numbers that I assumed I had made a mistake in my coding. After I did the math manually, I realized that I had it right, but the numbers were still astounding.

I have one relatively short madlib script that outputs around 150 words. However, once you take into account number of possible rows in each database it draws from, plus the numerous wildcard sets, that script has approx 42311189564227584000 possible unique permutations.

To give you an idea of how steep the corelation is between input and output, here are some numbers.

Each line represents one word group.
10 <-- first group has 10 words
20 <-- second group has 2 words
100 <-- third group has 5 words
1300 <-- fourth group has 13 words
20800 <-- etc etc etc
166400
998400
10982400
54912000
219648000
1537536000
4612608000
27675648000
110702592000
332107776000
996323328000
3985293312000
15941173248000
95647039488000
382588157952000
2295528947712000
9182115790848000
36728463163392000
110185389490176000
330556168470528000
1322224673882112000
5288898695528448000
10577797391056896000
42311189564227584000

For all you programmers out there, here is how I am calculating permutations (this needs to be threaded to have any production application):

class Array
def sequence(i = 0, *a)
    return [a] if i == size
    self[i].map {|x|
      sequence(i+1, *(a + [x]))
    }.inject([]) {|m, x| m + x}
end
end

input = [
["my","your","her","his","our"],
["goat","sailboat","cabin"],
["is","is usually","is always"],
["stinky","leaking","clean"]
]

output = input.sequence

p output.length
p output

An Introduction to Datapresser's Content Generator

After receiving numerous requests, I have created a brief demonstration of how Datapresser's Unique Content Generation system works.

Enjoy!

PS: You may want to view it in full size, since the images don't look great at this width.

Datapresser - Introduction to Content Generation

Advanced Content Generation a brief introduction Why do I want to Generate Content? Content = Spider Food Good Spider Food = Happy Spiders Happy Spiders = Indexed Pages Indexed Pages = Backlinks & Advertising $$ You are not just creating content... You are creating Value. The more indexed content you have, the more backlinks you can create for your websites. The more indexed content you have, the more pages you can serve advertising on. How does content = backlinks? Datapresser allows you to insert your own custom backlinks into your created content. This lets you create your own backlinks to your other money sites. Datapresser can create an infinite amount of completely unique, random, 100% legible content. Datapresser creates content that can fool a human reader. HOW?!? Pattern Replacement Pattern Replacement (also known as 'madlibs') is how Datapresser creates unique content. By training Datapresser with madlib scripts, you can create any type of content you wish. HERE IS AN EXAMPLE OF A MADLIB SCRIPT {|Custom|Suzy, Sally, John, Jacob} {|Custom|is, was, will be, wants to be} {|Custom|a Doctor, a Nurse, an Actor, an Acrobat} HERE ARE THE RESULTS OF THAT MADLIB SCRIPT John wants to be a Nurse. Or Sally was a Doctor. Or Suzy wants to be an Acrobat. Or Jacob wants to be an Actor. ..etc.. Simple, right? Datapresser takes this very simple concept, and elevates it to a whole new level by providing vast amounts of content to choose from. Draw data from a wide variety of sources, and maxandmatch to your hearts content. EXAMPLE SCRIPT: {|Randomperson|first}'s {|Custom|favorite, most loved, fave, preferred} Baseball Player is {|BaseballPlayer|first_name} {|BaseballPlayer|last_name}. Born {|BaseballPlayer|dob}, {|BaseballPlayer|first_name} has {|Custom|incredible, unbelievable, amazing, extraordinary, fantastic} stats: He Bats {|BaseballPlayer|bats}handed and throws {|BaseballPlayer|throws} handed His height is {|BaseballPlayer|height} and his weight is {|BaseballPlayer|weight} RESULT: Irene's preferred Baseball Player is Billy Gardner. Born 07191927, Billy has amazing stats: He Bats Righthanded and throws Righthanded His height is 600 and his weight is 180 or Ted's most loved Baseball Player is Sandy Ullrich. Born 07251921, Sandy has incredible stats: He Bats Righthanded and throws Righthanded His height is 601 and his weight is 180 or Gregory's favorite Baseball Player is Chris Eddy. Born 11271969, Chris has fantastic stats: He Bats Lefthanded and throws Lefthanded His height is 603 and his weight is 200 or Steve's fave Baseball Player is George Payne. Born 05231889, George has unbelieveable stats: He Bats Righthanded and throws Righthanded His height is 511 and his weight is 172 Make it ULTRAUnique Datapresser gives you the ability to use different scripts in combination with eachother so you dont have to repeat the same style of content over and over. Advanced Language Processing A built in English Dictionary allows you to quickly and easily randomize your content. Use Wordze Keyword Search Integrated Wordze Keyword Search allows you to do onthefly keword research for your niche content. This $45/month value is free to all Datapresser Members. What makes Datapresser's Content Generator the best? Wellscripted content made by Datapresser can pass human inspection by Google or anyone else. No Scraping = No Duplicate Content Penalties No Scraping = No Angry Webmasters Datapresser can create AutoPosting Wordpress Blogs An Infinite Amount of MixandMatch Possibilities OneofaKind There is no other tool out there that can match the quality, usability, and reliability of Datapresser. Datapresser is truly oneofakind. I hope you enjoyed this brief introduction to Datapresser: Advanced Content Generation. Check out Datapresser Today

Datapresser.com

An open letter to all my Friends across all Social Networks.

Dear friends,

I am contacting all current friends (former-lovers and family members included) on each of the many social networks to which I belong, to let you all know some difficult news.

My current capacity for servicing and maintaining a reliable friendship-service is quickly reaching its limit. I am having problems coping with the current social-load that my friendship-service platform is experiencing.

I simply do not have the resources at my disposal to adequately service each of your friendship needs; the rate at which I am currently amassing new friendships is not sustainable, given the standards to which my friendship-serving platform has been built. In a nut-shell, I'm having problems scaling.

Obviously this is an important issue that must be dealt with before it comes to a head. Decisive action must be taken now in order to avoid any disruptions in my friendship-services, or any kind of roaming social blackouts. I am sure you are all applauding my foresight. Thank you.

It has been suggested that I might outsource to a team in India so that I could delegate surplus friendship-service-requests to them for handling. I have given this option serious and thorough consideration. At the cost of $0.03 per pleasantry-exchange, $0.07 per reassuring-comment, and $0.10 per flattering-remark, it did at first seem like a viable option. However, after bringing in an expert team of statistical-analysts to review my companionship-logs, I have discovered some inconvenient truths about the most common uses of my friendship-services. It appears that the greatest consumption of my resources are the constant 'drinking-buddy' requests that my friendship-serving platform has to handle. Unfortunately, I cannot rely on a team in India to adequately fulfill these requests to the current level of sophistication to which many of you have become accustomed. My research has shown me that the only way I could outsource the same high quality 'drinking-buddy' service would be to contract out to an Irish Rugby team. Unfortunately, this is not a financially viable option.

It has further been suggested that I might adopt a tiered service model; offering several low monthly payment options through which friends could access different tiers of service. Although it is my duty (as a trusted long-term provider of companionship-services) to make you aware of the options available, I want to reassure you that I do not consider tiered service to be a viable option to solve my capacity issues. I am a firm believer in friendship-neutrality. I will not accept money. Such a thing simply goes against the principals on which my platform was built.

Speaking of my platforms construction, I wish to briefly address many of you who have claimed that my friendship-service platform has been built on a language and architecture that are inherently flawed. I have received assurances, from both whats left of my development team and some of the smartest (and most erratic) experts available, that my capacity issues and inability to handle high social-loads are not related to the language or architecture of my friendship-service platform.

My friends, it is my belief as an experienced and dedicated purveyor of the finest friendship services available, that there is simply no physical way to scale my serving upwards and still maintain the high level of friendship-request-fulfillment to which you have all become accustomed. The only option before us may seem unsettling - and somewhat extreme - at first glance, however, I assure you that it will be for the greater good, and the community will continue to thrive because of the sacrifices we make today...

My friends, I am afraid that some of you are going to have to be 'let go'.

If you wish to continue to send requests to my friendship-serving platform, I require that you prove your appreciation of my high quality friendship-services by buying me a gift of your choosing (not less than $20.00(CAN) value). I am sure you will agree that I really deserve it, and although I will not be able to contact each of you personally to express my gratitude, I'd like to tell you that I 'really appreciate it', and 'thanks'. In return for your one time gift of appreciation, I will continue to provide you with access to my friendship-service platform and will continue to meet your social-needs without disruption.

As for those of you freeloading social-parasites who elect not to show your appreciation of my services, I am afraid you'll end up on the chopping block. I want you to understand that there are absolutely no hard feelings. We had a great run, you and I. We'll always have the memories. It's important that you understand that it's not you; it's me. I wish you all the best, and if you ever decide to change your mind, don't hesitate to buy me something pretty.

In friendship,

Interested in Learning how to Break CAPTCHAs?

With the number of people openly discussing CAPTCHA solving techniques and posting examples, the efficacy of the CAPTCHA as a method for curbing spam is becoming questionable at best. People are automating CAPTCHA decoding left right and center, and those few CAPTCHAs that can't be easily automated are simply run through services like captchasolver.com which use Amazons Mechanical Turk API (at least, I think it uses Mechanical Turk. I may be wrong.)

At any rate, blackhat-seo.com just posted a great list of CAPTCHA breaking resources, so if you are interested in reading more about how to break CAPTCHAs, or you are just interested in seeing how ubiquitous CAPTCHA breaking has become, I recommend you head over there and check it out.

Stuffing website inputs: A technique for gaining backlinks.

I've been a very bad blogger, I know.

It has been almost a month since I last posted, but I have a good excuse: Datapresser. I have been coding and designing the new version for the past few weeks. I'm not too far behind schedule, and should be able to launch it live by the end of the month. I know alot of you who are members have been patiently waiting for it, and since the forums are busted, I know you havent been able to post and vent your rage at me for being late with the new release. I apologize. Check your emails for a status update and hang tight, because the wait will be worth it. (A new forum is coming too! Scouts Honor!)

Apologies aside, it is shaping up to be pretty spectacular. I'm not quite ready to let the cat out of the bag yet, but I will soon share some video and some screenshots with everyone, so expect that to come within a few weeks.

OK, since that's out of the way, let's get down to business, shall we?

Today, I'd like to talk about backlinks. Specifically, I'd like to introduce a method for getting some easy backlinks. This is something that I've always considered fairly obvious, but I was discussing it recently with a friend of mine who had never considered it. In light of that, I figured I might as well spill my guts to the rest of you in hopes that you may also benefit from this advice.

We all know about XSS, of course. We know that unsanitized user input can leave a website open to malicious attacks or to less malicious exploitations for garnering backlinks. There has been much back and forth discussion about whether or not links gained through XSS have any staying power (or any power at all, for that matter). Here is an example. (By the way, I disclosed this vulnerability to the owners of that site over 6 months ago, so I have no issue showing everyone here.) Now, since XSS isn't really what I want to focus on in this post, I don't want to get into the issue of whether or not these sorts of links are worth anything. If you are all really curious, keep on eye on that link and see if it gets indexed. (Keep in mind, even though a link might show up in Yahoo, that doesnt mean it is worth anything.)

I wanted to show you this as a first example because this type of XSS is simply an advanced facet of a really simple technique: gaining backlinks by stuffing inputs.

Here is an example of stuffing an input: Quantcast

So, by now, are ya pickin' up what I'm puttin' down? This kind of stuff CAN get indexed (with a little effort on your part). You can focus on getting these pages indexed through whatever means you have at your disposal (linking from your database sites and farm sites, submitting these links to shady directories, throwing them up on link dumps like twemes, etcetera.)

(As a side note, Irish Wonder recently posted about another very effective use of quantcast that no longer works. The method Irish Wonder talks about was particularly golden because it was quick and easy to create profile pages that were well linked to from other pages on the Quantcast site, whereas what I've shown you results in orphaned pages that you'll have to link to and index yourself. Thanks to NickyCakes for setting me straight on this point. :P )

Do you see the potential in this? There are thousands upon thousands of sites out there that do this sort of thing, and it couldn't be easier to automate them. All you have to do is compile a database of each target-site to exploit, run your list of your own sites through each target-site, save the resulting URL and then get those URLs indexed. Free Backlinks; maybe not high quality backlinks, but free nonetheless.

I have given you all a simple example here, but it is certainly not the cream of the crop. This requires some research on your part and some patience. No links are treated equally, and I often question just how many of the links I make through this method are actually worth anything. That said, I feel that it is really such a simple automated process that even if some of the links are junk, it is still worth the minimal effort I put into it.

Here is what I do: I have a folder on my toolbar that I throw exploitable urls into as I come across them. Every so often, I'll go through each link in that folder and I'll check out the robots.txt and the on-page tags to make sure its a valid target. If it passes inspection, I insert it into a database with all the others. At this point, when I start a new site, I can easily run it through each exploitable site in the database and take the resulting list of URLs and then set them up to be auto posted as backlinks on some blogs in my farms.

The result? Links. Whether or not they are great quality links really isnt the question. Even junk backlinks have a use (eg: obfuscating the rest of your sites backlinks to prevent espionage.)

Finding Recent Proxy Lists

I touched on this topic a long time ago with a post called Dude Wheres My Proxy?!?

But I wanted to show you guys another quick google dork to take that search to the next level:

This Google Query will return all proxy lists added to the index in the past month (or past week or whatever you want)

This is still not a perfect way to find new proxies to use, since the lists are public they are full of either outdated or dead or already flagged proxies. By using the date modifier in your google search, you can at least try to eliminate as many old outdated proxy lists as possible.

Run these through your proxy checker script and away you go!

Finding FREE Keyword Focused Content

At this exact moment, there are a staggering number of conversations taking place on the web. People are talking, man! And they're talking about STUFF! Real STUFF! Like Cars, and Toothpaste, and Shoes, and Credit Cards!! AMAZING, eh?

OK, so maybe it's not totally amazing, but what IS amazing is that you can leverage all these free conversations for content.

For the sake of this post, I hacked up a quick and dirty sample that scrapes summize.com to deliver keyword focused chunks of content for you to use however you see fit. This is programmed in Ruby, using the Mechanize Gem (my favorite gem for scraping).

Let's say we're promoting an offer for a credit check, or something of that nature. Naturally, we'll want some content that is focused around the keyphrase "credit check"

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'

agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
agent.user_agent_alias = "Windows Mozilla"

query = "credit check"
doc = agent.get("http://summize.com/search?q=#{query}")

messages = doc.search("div.msg")

for message in messages
message.search("a").remove
content = message.search("span")
puts content.inner_text
end

And the output from this little chunk of ruby coolness?

Having a crappy Saturn experience. Salesperson won't check other dealers for cars. Won't let me fax credit ap. 2 hrs to pick up the car?
I always lose the new activations to the credit check.
pending credit check.... im fucking moving!!!!!!!!!
Audio Visual: No credit check contract mobiles sony ericsson,nokia,samsung,motorola order online at..
After waiting 3 fucking weeks my $50 check from ACE credit group. Gave $10 to Teresa since I owe her and kept the rest.
My credit union's web site is back up. Sadly no rebate check. Didn't really expect it today based on my SSN.
I'm debating wether I should walk up to Court St. to drop off a check at the Credit Union....
I'll check out the Wings over Col. next week, new month, new credit card bill. ;) Shade on the Canal in Canal Win. has good wings
Boo.. just short of getting my rebate check today...I really wanted to stimulate the economy by lowering my credit card debt too...oh wait..
cash or check only. they don't take credit or debit. we found that one out the hard way.

Yup. Free content.

This content shouldn't form the foundation of your sites text, but it is the perfect kind of stuff to put in a sidebar. This is good content to round out your existing pages in a relevant and unique way. I'd suggest putting this sort of content in a side bar, and making it look just like some kind of widget.

BTW, I should have mentioned: Summize has an API. http://summize.com/api

New Free Database Available!

I've just uploaded an awesome new database for you all: a complete A-Z dictionary of medical terms. Over 137,000 rows of content!

Check it out for yourself! You'll find it at the top of the list in the downloads section.

Have fun!

WeAllHateQuickBooks (.com)

If you were the head of the Marketing / PR team responsible for the QuickBooks brand, would you not lay an egg upon seeing http://weallhatequickbooks.com/ ?

This is a great example of how Twitter can be used to impact brand reputations on the Internet. It's reminiscent of the @TechCrunch vs./ Comcast incident. Regardless, it's a brilliant promotion for the folks at less everything

Dear Twitter Spammers: You're Doing it Wrong.

Using twitter as a link dump for backlinks really isn't a very disruptive use of the system. You dont need any followers, so you don't have to worry about mass-following a whole bunch of people and annoying them by inflating their follower-count or clogging their email with notifications. I really don't see any problem with doing this because it doesn't annoy anyone.

But alot of you are trying to leverage Twitter to get traffic to your sites. You mass follow a whole bunch of people in hopes that they will follow you back and then will see and click on your spam links. You've created a Twitter name like: weightloss or wuyitea or herbalremedy, or some other product/keyword. Then you're scraping some tweets from rss or from related websites, or usually news feeds. You're tweeting out maybe 4 messages a day, all at the same time, and every message has a link back to your site, or your squidoo lens.

I've got news for you guys: You're all doing it wrong.

Before we go any futher, I want to mention that I'm not truly convinced that there is any substantial value in spamming Twitter to get traffic to your sites. There are many twitter users who get great traffic to their sites from their tweets, but that is because they have real personalities that people want to follow. It's impossible to fake a personality, unless you're Hillary Clinton (oh SNAP!). I think there are better things you could spend your time doing which guarantee better results. That said, I just couldn't help chiming in with some advice for you all, because if you are really intent on annoying the living hell out of people with your Twitter spam, I'd like you to least justify it by doing it effectively and getting the best traffic you can out of it.

So, were I to waste my time spamming Twitter, here's how I would do it:

1) Pick a good name. Don't pick a product or a keyword, that just sets alarm bells ringing. And remember: You don't need to mass create Twitter accounts. You need to create a handful of really solid natural looking accounts. You're going for longevity here, not hit and run.

2) Upload an avatar.

3) Set your profile webpage link to a real page you own, maybe a blog, but NOT a squidoo lens or affiliate site. This is important. I'll come back to it later

4) Prepare your script not to just pull and tweet news headlines. In addition to your regular content sources (headlines, rss feeds etc) try scraping tweets off the public twitter timeline and retweeting some of those. This will go a long way in making your account look natural. Speaking of looking natural, don't tweet at regular intervals. I see most spam accounts tweet 3-5 times a day all at once at the same time every day. Try tweeting ~10 times a day at different times. Also, don't put links in every tweet. Maybe tweet two links a day to your money sites, and try to vary the sites you are promoting. There are sites that track your spam account based on the frequency at which you post the same link (http://www.twitspam.com/).

5) Now that you've got your script ready, you are ready to start following a bunch of people in hopes that they'll follow you back. The trick here is to appear completely natural. The more natural you appear, the better your chances are of being followed in return. Dont follow 10,000 people at once, but rather, for your first batch, follow ~200 people. After a day or so, unfollow those ~200 people and grab the number of new followers your account has. Lets say of those ~200 people, 122 followed you back (that's pretty optimistic). You will then follow 122 NEW people, and wait another day for them to follow you back. Maybe now you'll have 183 followers. Unfollow the 122 people you followed the day before, and follow 183 NEW people. Rinse and repeat.

This way, your account will always have a somewhat balanced following/followers count. Having an unbalanced following/followers count is a sure sign of a spam account.

6) Remember step 3 where you set your profile webpage to a blog? You can assume that at least some of the people you follow will check out your twitter page and then click through to see your webpage. Armed with this knowledge, you can get them to follow you back without them even realizing it. You do this with a little CSRF. On your page, call out this url: http://twitter.com/friendships/create/youraccountnumber. Since they just came from your Twitter profile, you know they are logged in to Twitter. By calling out that url, you tell the Twitter system to make their account follow you. You have to set this up in such a way that you scrub out the referrer on the request, so a simple 1px iframe won't cut it. I'll leave that part to you guys to figure out.

So there you have it. Have fun wasting your time spamming Twitter. If you need me, I'll be busy hunting bigger game.

Why Google's App Engine Makes Me Nervous

If you're an avid blog reader, chances are you've already read the news of Google's new AppEngine somewhere already this morning. Probably on TechCrunch?

I don't want to bother rehashing what other people are already talking about. All I want to ask my readers is this: Doesn't the idea of handing Google your code make you a little bit nervous?

Call me paranoid, but here's how I see it: If you are a small startup, you don't have alot of assets. All you have is an idea, and your code. Your code is, in fact, one of your greatest assets. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but your code is what brings your ideas to life. How you implement your ideas through your code is what sets your business apart from others.

Google has already demonstrated an immense desire to invest in startups with unique ideas and the right code to implement them. By storing your code with Google, what is to stop them from just peeking in? By using the AppEngine, you basically give Google a back door into your startup.

Now, before you all think I'm sitting here wrapping tinfoil around my head, let me quote some passages from the AppEngine Terms of Service:

6.3. Except as provided in Section 8, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content or the Application that you create, submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Service, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content and the Application

8.1. Google claims no ownership or control over any Content or Application. You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in the Content and/or Application, and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content on or through the Service you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Content for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy. Furthermore, by creating an Application through use of the Service, you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Application for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy.

Now, I'm far from an expert at legalese (so please correct me if you think Im off base here), but what this basically says to me is that Google won't be claiming owneship of your application. They are reassuring you that your appication does indeed remain under your ownership. That said, they are stating that they do reserve the right to adapt, modify, publish, and distribute your application.

I've been in business long enough to know that a company must adhere to its contractual obligations in a public setting. But internally, a company will do its best to find some wiggle-room within its legal obligations; especially when it stands to benefit from doing so. Google could never get away with just blatently reproducing your code under its own brand. There would be a huge out-cry from the public if they were to do that. But nothing is stopping them from looking at your code and learning from it. Nothing is stopping them from evaluating your startup's potential at an extremely intimate level; because you've already pulled down your pants and given them access to everything: code, content & userbase. It's all stored in the Google cloud for them to see.

If Youtube had been built on Google's AppEngine, do you think Google would have shelled out such major bucks for them? They might have shelled out less, or they might have shelled out even more; it all depends on how valuable they thought Youtube was after having unrestricted access to their backend.

And that's the crux of what I'm getting at: Google AppEngine is an incubator. AppEngine makes it easy for Google to evaluate the potential of a startup before it even publically expresses an interest in acquiring it. They don't have to deal with the legal hand-wringing that goes along with trying to evaluate a potential acquisition. They just look into their cloud and decide: is this something we want? If so, how much do we want to pay for it?

By using AppEngine for your startup, you let Google see your cards. There is no room left for bargaining, because Google will come to the table and already know everything they need to know.

I'd like to discuss this with you readers. If you have an opinion, please feel free to lay it on me by posting in the comments. Am I way off base here? I don't think so, but maybe you disagree.

Taking Content Generation to the Next Level

I just read two blog articles echoing the same sentiment.

One by Mark on Digerati, and one by SlightlyShady. These two articles both highlighted the most obvious epiphany one could glean from the Google Spam Docs: The algorithm cannot be perfect. Google needs a huge team to catch the spam that fools the algo. They need humans. And as SlightlyShady wrote "Humans are easy to fool.".

There are many aspects of a website that might indicate it is spam: design & layout, imagery, links (and linking patterns), site architecture, age, TLD, and of course, content. Content is probably the greatest stumbling block when it comes to creating sites that can pass human inspection.

We know how to create content that can fool the algorithm, but how do we create content that can fool Google's army of Monkeys at typewriters?

We can't expect to get away with markov content or synonym replacement; not for any respectable period of time anyways. After a while, if our sites eventually rank high enough to warrant human intervention, even scraped content is easy to detect as being duplicate.

A basic directive of the Google Spam Wranglers guidelines is to pare away all the scraped content and if whatever is left is just ads, then its most likely spam.

So how do we take content generation to the next level?

We need to create legible, syntacticly correct content that a human can read and make sense of. The key to this is taking small distinct chunks of data and splicing them together with joiner words or phrases. Yes, I'm talking about madlibbing.

A madlib script can create legible content and have thousands of different iterations. It takes a lot more creativity to create a madlib script than it does to set up some feed scraper blog, but the extra time is an investment in the future. This content has great staying power over the long term, and if executed properly, it will never result in your site getting banned.

If you are really worried about the time and creativity required to write madlib scripts, hire a writer. Think of it like this, you could pay an article writer $5 to write a great article that you can use once. Or you can pay an article writer $10 to write a great madlib script that you can use to create 1000 different articles.

Of course, there are more things than content to consider when planning to create spam that passes human inspection.

How about page Design?

You always need a template to spin blogs from, but you really kind of need an `un-template`; something highly versatile. Wordpress does this well.

Wordpress works well because you can easily switch themes. Create a wordpress install package that you can use on all your servers, include a whole bunch of different themes. Also think about including a plugin like this for rotating header images (hxxp://mhough.com/wordpress/2007/header-image-rotator-plugin/) this way, you can always have a different image that is not the themes default image. Be sure to include a whole bunch of different images in your package!

I imagine the truly intrepid among you will rewrite the code for the default blogroll links in your install package.

Remember Google's directive of paring back content to see if just ads are leftover? Well here's a revelation: How about you don't include ads? The decision is really up to you, of course. You have to ask yourself why you are creating these sites...ad money or linking power?

And don't forget linking.

To quote an old post Birds, Bimbos, and Blog Networks:

I'd suggest breaking your network of blogs into chunks of say 5 -10 blogs, assigning an independent IP to each chunk. Consider interlinking the blogs in a chunk if each part of the chunk seems relevant to the others. Obviously, don't link to other chunks/other IP ranges. If you want to take caution a step further, be aware of not cross promoting links on each chunk; by back searching a sites links, your network can be laid open to public view.

Now that I read this quote, I'd also add that sometimes you actually want to link 4 or 5 chunks to the same URL, because you are going to need more linking power then just one chunk can provide. As long as you are sure that you aren't interlinking your chunks en-masse, you can quarantine off parts on your network for other uses.

At any rate, these are just a few extraneous thoughts off the top of the dome. What I'm really focused on right now is the content angle, not so much the other factors. I have many more thoughts on the subject of creating content, and specifically on how to use the technique to maximum advantage. For now, though, I want to ask you guys: What do you think is the best way to create content that passes human inspection?

Using Twitter to Collect Email Addresses

Want to collect peoples email's using Twitter? Why not?

COLLECT GMAIL ADDRESS TWEETS

COLLECT HOTMAIL ADDRESS TWEETS

COLLECT LIVE ADDRESS TWEETS

COLLECT YAHOO ADDRESS TWEETS

Ok, I promise I'll stop posting about twitter topics...soon....soon....

Until then, if you are a sucker for punishment, you can always follow me on Twitter

UPDATE: This loophole in the twitter/tweetscan system has been fixed. See ladies and gents? Disclosure DOES work.

I just know some of the more righteous among you are shaking your head and thinking that Im destroying good exploits by blogging about them. To which I say: Get over yourself. Its Twitter, not Craigslist. And besides, I like Twitter, so if I can contribute to making Twitter a better system by talking about its issues, then that's pretty cool.

Amplify your blog farm with Twitter and Twitterfeed

OK, let's continue on in the same vein and talk a bit more about Twitter. Specifically, let's talk about using Twitter to amplify your Blog, or (better yet) your blog farm.

If you're using a tool like Datapresser, then you already have a healthy blog farm that is autoposting content and links for you.

Let's say we've got 100 new pages of content going up everyday, and everything is running smoothly. Of course, we're always interested in ways to get easy links to our new content, aren't we?

Well, using Twitter and Twitterfeed.com, we can automatically get a twitter account to tweet each post as it gets published, for each blog in our blog farm. That, in itself, is no big deal: it's precisely the intended use of Twitterfeed.com. But, it gets interesting when we consider the implications of last wednesdays post on leveraging Twemes.com for backlinks.

Here is a screenshot from the Twitterfeed setup page. This should describe what I'm getting at:

As you can see, by using the filter option, we can use Twitterfeed to have our twitter account for the keyword 'leathershoes' tweet any post that has 'leathershoes' in it. Further, every tweet that gets sent out will have the Twemes hashtag for #leathershoes, which means it will be reposted to m.twemes.com/leathershoes

Now, here's where the idea gets kind of wonky. Twitterfeed makes your Twitter account tweet the Title, Description and URL of your new content. Unfortunately the URL is a Tinyurl link, which is bogus as far as Googlebot is concerned. You won't get any linkjuice from this link. The way I see it, there are a few ways you can make this work.

My principal suggestion is this: Twemes will publish a URL in the body of a tweet as a live link This means you can set Twitterfeed to tweet just the description of the post and uncheck the box for including a link. Then you just include your own link by making sure the URL for the post is the first thing in the description.

Your other options are:

1) If you can create a small enough Tweme - eg: #baby - you'd then have 15 other characters to squeeze in your url which would link back to your blog (Obviously this is kind of limiting).

2) It's not always about linking, sometimes its just about getting traffic & getting clicks. I almost shudder to suggest this, but you can always tweet into the most popular Twemes at the time, like #SXSW. You'll start pissing people off and getting your scheme and network noticed pretty quick. I really dont suggest you do this.

Have fun!

Exploiting Twitter for backlinks

As most of you know by now, I <3 Twitter.

I use my main twitter account for legitmate purposes, but I've also been tinkering with ways you can exploit twitter for your own gain. You see, Twitter is easy to automate because their API is so easy to use. There are TONS of different sites and services out there that leverage twitter, republish tweets and so on.

A good example is twemes.com. Twemes aggregates tweets that employ the same phrases preceded by hashtags - also known as an Octothorpe, thanks Luc :) - for example, right now a really hot tweme is #SXSW.

And you know what? Twemes doesnt use nofollow tags for their links.

You might consider leveraging this site as a link dump by creating a handful of different twitter accounts and creating new memes for yourself along your keywords. Your tweet might be something like, "#leathershoes this site is awesome http://www.leathershoes.com" then if you were to goto twemes.com/leathershoes, guess what, there's your link. I made an example here.

This is just the first of many different ways you can exploit twitter for your own devious results. I'll try to write more on this topic in the future.

Later!

PS: I should mention this one last thing: When I create a new link, at twemes or anywhere else, I like to promote it to the SE's. Everyone has a different approach to this...personally, I use SQUIRT. When promoting the twemes linkdumps, I like to use the mobile page (m.twemes.com/yourpage) because there is less crud for the bots to choke on....

This is why I love twitter

From now on, whenever people ask me why I love twitter, I will simply point to this post.

....'nuf said.

On Time.....

Time is subjective from subject to subject depending on the time...for me time stands still, for you there's not enough time in the day.

What part of reality is governed by this inconsistent constant?

One time I took the time to write down all the terms about time I could remember, in a timely manner of course. I filled two pages, and from time to time I still remember a phrase about time that I forgot that time I wrote the list of terms about time...time is of the essence and essentially a waste of time, I mean most of the time, time is wasted time, waiting for the right time to make the timing right.

Time is, in one sense, immeasureable, and in another, measured down to the slightest nano-second. Time is nothing, and it is everything. Time is all we have, and we never have enough time. It is our most important resource, and the most fleeting.

The most basic lesson to take away from all this rambling is that you simply don't have enough time to put off to tomorrow what you should take care of today.
(Thanks for the inspiration Kerry)

Goal, Result, Consequence - Picking Effective Strategies

I want to write a post about picking the most effective search strategies to achieve desired results. Further, I want to talk about whether one should go about acheiving those result by employing whitehat practices, or blackhat practices.

The problem is, I refuse to enter into the blackhat vs. whitehat debate and sound off as an advocate for either side. The two terms have become so clouded in ethical debate that its impossible to convey the concepts that they actually represent. So, it's therefore impossible for me to write the post that I want to write.

Unless you agree to a proposition......

I propose we approach a specific SEO problem, and that for the sake of this post, we consider whitehat seo as “organic search manipulation”, and blackhat seo as “artifical search manipulation”. I propose, for the sake of this post, we approach the problem while forgetting the word “spam”; we forget all moral, ethical and professional objections we might have to artifical/organic search manipulation.

Instead, we'll simply think of the following: Goal, Result, Consequence.

Let's say we have a Real Estate lead-generating site which has a variety of high converting landing pages that target particular communities and geographic areas. These leads are later sold on, for a premium, to realtors/developers in those areas.

Our problem is this: The landing pages on the site don't rank well for their respective targets because there isn't much content and the entire site lacks authority. Let's also assume that we want to be certain that the moneymaking site itself doesn't appear questionable and therefore doesn't have a lot of keyword stuffed content.

So our Goal is: Deliver quality traffic to each lead generating landing page without relying on direct search engine traffic.

For this example, we need to funnel both link juice and quality traffic to those pages through intermediary sites. These networks of sites are the middle-man between the search engine and the money making site. Their job is to rank in the search engine and pass traffic onto their respective landing page targets.

So, there are two ways to approach this, organically or artificially.

The organic approach is to create many legitimate sites with content written by content writers; each sites content to be targeted to its respective landing page. These sites have quality design, nice imagery and generally look entirely innocuous. There should be many links on the site that point to the target landing page (save for a few barely noticeable outbound links to related quality sites), also including onsite advertising (banners etc). This way it becomes pretty hard for the visitor to NOT end up at your lead generating page.

Normally the artificial approach would differ from the organic approach in that we wouldn't be hiring content writers, but rather, we'd be mass generating content that would target our keywords broadly. For the sake of generating Real Estate leads, we know that won't cut it, because we want to deliver high quality leads that convert into sales. Besides, since we know how well these leads can pay, we can still afford to hire content writers. So, in that sense, the artifcial approach to this situation is much the same as the organic one in that we create sites with targeted human written content. But that's where the similarities end. Instead of creating sites that please the human eye, we employ IP delivery. We show bots a bare bones site with our targeted content. This site also has some respectable outgoing links and some images and a basic layout, so as to appear legitimate to the algorithm. When the site receives hits from IPs not identified as being bots, they are immediately transferred over to the lead generating landing page.

So, those are our two approaches. Now, how about the results?

The results for the organic search manipulation might play out something like this:

For every 1000 uniques to the organic intermediary site, we might achieve 500-600 visits to our landing page. At that point, how well they convert into leads depends on the performance of our landing page. These people who convert will be people who A) resonated with the search result displaying our intermediary site, B) resonated with the content of our intermediary site enough to click on something instead of bouncing and C) resonated with the landing page enough to fill out the lead form. That all adds up to very targeted leads. They've passed a three filter process and we've successfully funneled them into our database.

For the results of the artificial search manipulation we can expect that for every 1000 non-bot visitors to our intermediary site, we will achieve 1000 visits to our landing page. Once again, how well those 1000 convert into leads depends largely on the landing page. Whereas above, the people passed a three filter funnel, the artificial approach passes visitors through a two filter funnel: they resonate with the search listing and click, and then they submit the lead form. These leads will be less targeted than the leads generated organically. That said, there are many more leads generated through this approach.

The consequences of the artificial method, in this case, are poor leads (if we care about our business reputation, we must deliver quality leads), and potential penalization for violating ToS. The costs and time required are relatively low compared to organically building site networks, but don't fool yourself: the degree of effort required is about the same.

The consequences of the organic method, in this case, is that we spend way more time playing grounds keeper to our farm of blogs (which definitely require upkeep!) but we at least deliver higher quality leads. We pay more out of pocket for the upkeep of our farm, and we have a much much reduced, but still present, potential of being penalized by Google. (face it, they're out to get'cha)

At the end of the day, the choice is yours. Perhaps you can cheaply pre-qualify your leads before reselling them and so the artificial approach makes financial sense. Perhaps you deem the risk of penalization to be too big of a threat to your business, so you decide that the organic approach is for you.

What's important is that we place all our options on a level playing field, and choose the one best suited to our goal, with the most desirous results, and least negative consequences.

How to modrewrite

This is an old post I made almost a year ago on WF, so I figured since I'm a bad blogger these days, I might as well post it here to make up for my otherwise embarrasing lack of effort.

If you are anything like me, the very sight of mod_rewrite code makes your brain cramp.

In all honesty, it looks like complete and utter gibberish, but there is a logic underneath it all.

You may already know that it can take your cumbersome dynamic URLs and magically transform them into understandable language instead of incomprehensible gibberish.

Par Example: (that means 'for example'. It's French. Really.)
ORIGINAL URL:
http://myawesomesite.com/index.php?tag=tutorial&page=2
MOD_REWRITE URL:
http://myawesomesite.com/tutorial/2

These URLs are better for a couple reasons.
Primarily, they are easier for your visitors to understand and remember.
Beyond that, these URLs can be keyword rich, which is great for search engines!

So now you see, mod_rewrite is a powerful tool if one can wrangle the language and make it work!

Example Deux (.....you get it)
Alright, so you'll need to goto whatever folder of your site you are wanting to start rewriting URLs from.
Backup the .htaccess file (just in case) and then pop 'er open!
For those of you just beginning to read up on this stuff, an .htaccess file is basically a file the lets you make changes to the way your server....uhhh...serves.....

For more information than that last meager explanation can provide, check out the official guide:
Welcome! - The Apache Software Foundation

Now then,
You got your .htaccess file open? Good.
Lets use the URL from the previous example.

Say this is your site:
http://myawesomesite.com/index.php?tag=tutorial&page=2

And, never being one to shy away from a challenge, you decide that you want URLs like this:
http://myawesomesite.com/tutorial/2

"Impossible?" You ask?
"NO!" I say!

To accomplish this amazing feat of URL trickery, add the following lines to your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule tutorial/2 index.php?tag=tutorial&page=2

To understand this, lets break it down line by line:

RewriteEngine on:
This line does exactly what it says, it turns on the engine that lets your Rewrite URLs

On line two, we see:
RewriteRule: This line tells the server to expect you to specify a rule about rewrite the url

tutorial/2: This line tells the server that when it serves the dynamic URL specific on the next line, it should replace it with this clean static URL

index.php?tag=tutorial&page=2: This tells the server which dynamic address to look out for.

This is a REALLY basic primer into mod rewrite, but it lets you understand its essence.

Bad Blogger, BAD BLOGGER!

OK, sorry things have been so dead around here lately.

Don't blame me! Blame Twitter!!!! I seem to do so much more talking on Twitter about things I'd normally write on this blog. It's shameful I know.

Let's recap some stuff that's been going on recently.

- I found a pretty awesome collection of downloadable dictionary databases, which is exactly the kind of thing that I get excited about. It's like finding buried treasure. We all know about Word Net, but there are some other really great pieces of data in there as well.

- Esrun outed a trick I told him about a while back.

Never mind the fact that I asked him not to talk about it...who cares....Esrun is practically a fucking saint for giving you all his little Gmail Account Creator script. So he can say whatever he wants.

Basically, when you are mass creating google accounts, after a few accounts are created, google will start serving you" sorry" messages instead of a captcha. The trick to get around this is to request the google captcha from one IP, but submit the form data from a second IP. Google doesn't cross reference the submitting IP with the requesting IP. I think this is somewhat tied into the fact that Google uses the same captcha/account provisioning service for several of its different web properties (Gmail, Blogger, etc).

So basically, all you need to create unlimited Gmail accounts is two IPs because Google isn't cross referencing them.

You know...come to think of it, I am somewhat depressed that Esrun stole my thunder on this one. You filthy sonuvabitch..... :)

Anyways, now Google will most likely patch it up pretty quick, so get on it now my friends!

- Thar be drama a brewin' over at WickedFire, as Jon baits Shoemoney and then receives a C&D, which of course leads to more drama. I have always liked Wicked Fire, but I feel that this is a little bit....much. Anyways, I posted my thoughts over there so I wont repeat them here.

And with that, I'm off to enjoy a well deserved weekend.

Play nice kids.

Great Adsense Copy & Google Bombing

I saw this adsense block today while playing Scrabulous and I thought it was devilish.

Take the ability to target your adsense channels, and combine it with great copy like this and you're sure to do well.

In other news, looks like google bombing still works, at least in some cases!

I'm sure many of you have heard of this already, but for those of you who havent, Danny Sullivan wrote an excellent piece on it over at Search Engine Land

I've started the second round of invites to Datapresser today, so if you haven't already, head on over to Datapresser and get your name on the wait list!