BlackHat SEO News & Reviews

This is what hacking is really for: defending freedom. Check out this news video:

While on StumbleUpon I found Johnny’s blog here where he mentioned Stryde’s “strides” to uncover the truth: Olympic Gymnast Jiang Yuyuan lied about her age in order to compete for China in the Beijing Olympics. What a disgrace. China already screwed up some things big time with this Olympics but this one is too far. I can almost understand athletes who dope, the competetive drive is strong. I can’t, however, understand corrupting a talented 14 year old girl just for some international bragging rights.

I see Stryde has kept blogging about his investigation on his blog here. Good luck to him, I hope the Chinese government never discovers where he is.

CONFESSION: I used to like and promote SEO Elite.

Those days are gone.

What does SEO Elite promise?

Discover how any page ranks at the top of the Search Engines. This promise is totally overinflated. It assumes that the software owner knows everything the search engines use to determine rankings. The feature of the software the supposedly delivers this benefit fails miserably.

Instantly finds hundreds of high page rank websites in your field. Yeah, but what good is that if they aren’t giving out backlinks. Who cares?

Searches for Super Affiliates willing to promote your products. Umm, isn’t that what Affiliate Elite is supposed to do? This program doesn’t really do that. This is a total stretch on what the software is ACTUALLY capable of.

Shows immediately which partners are still linking back to you. A lot of free programs do that too. There isn’t much benefit here because exchanging links the traditional way is a no-no now. Google doesn’t like it and is penalizing sites who do it.

Allows you to do a backlink search on all major search engines. This is sorta helpful because it saves a little time, but if you do it a lot the software isn’t built to deal with the search engine’s anti-spam features that block lots of automated queries, so this is a kinda-sorta type promise.

Learns how many and which pages each major search engine has indexed. Oh goodie, another blindingly obvious feature than anybody with a keyboard can do. No benefits here really. It’s slow enough in my opinion that it doesn’t actually save any time.

Notifies and keeps a daily, weekly, and monthly change record of where your website is ranked for ANY search term. It’s handy that it keeps a chart, but it only updates when you go in and tell it too, and once again, as it searches for your rankings, the program craps out and stops getting results after Google captchas the queries. This kind of thing could actually end up HARMING you.

Analyzes and compares special search commands on Google to the “regular” Google search rankings