BlackHat SEO News & Reviews

Project Black Mask brings two words to mind:

STOO PID

OK, maybe just one word. OLD!

You would have thought that a 97 page ebook would teach a little more than the most basic principles and concepts of Black Hat SEO for Google Adsense. If you’ve never heard of blogging, cloaking, link spamming, or automation, then maybe you’ll glean some benefit from the program. I just felt deceived.

The whole point of Project Black Mask is to sell the off-the-shelf black hat programs. Chris gives a brief idea of what you need to do, then hits you with affiliate links for programs you’ll need to make it happen. That works on n00bs but not on experienced webmasters – especially Black Hatters.

A glaring defect is that there’s no instruction on how to customize the templates you’ll be using. If you do it the way it’s presented, you’ll leave footprints all over the internet – allowing companies to crush your empire in one fell swoop. Can you say “w00t” for Google?

The manual also says you need fly-catcher pages (opt-ins or squeeze pages), spam to .edu sites, buy backlinks that have high Google page rank (we all know Google loves that…) and to cultivate a blog farm. Sadly, none of these techniques are taught. It’s a manual marketed to introduce n00bs to black hat but the real purpose is to sell black hat tools to n00bs who won’t be able to use them properly.

I don’t really think the author of this book does what he says he does, and just scraped content from the sndyk8.net forum or outsourced the creation of the book to someone.

Notably, there is no mention of many of the most popular sites such as Myspace or Youtube etc. That leaves a lot out since those are two of black hatters favorite sites.

The price for this product has earned it a spot on the shit list. If it was $10 like The Rich Jerk whose ebook is also targeted to n00bs to sell lots of tools, then I could approve it. But since the point is to exploit the pocketbooks of impressionable black hat n00bs with an initial high price tag then requiring more money to implement the strategies, this manual is going in the toilet.

I give Project Black Mask a 2/10

Now that the fever of SE Nuke has died down, it’s appropriate to take a step back and evaluate the program objectively. It was so much hype that I had to join just so I would stop reading people’s emails about it.

The site is run with the appearance of, I dunno, a white hat site but the tool should be considered black hat since it automates submissions to lots of sites that don’t like automated submissions. One of the factors that attracted me to the program initially was the automated squidoo lens building, but that was quickly removed.

The program takes forever to set up if you do it by hand. Any sensible person will realize that they’re gonna have to register new accounts and build them to look human initially, which was a huge turn off for me. Second, it’s trying to be a jack-of-all trades. I’m not a fan of programs that try to do too much. As we’ve seen with SENuke, it’s always being updated and it’s a matter of downloading, extracting, and replacing. The best updating software I’ve had is Video Post Robot which updated itself. SENuke could do that as well.

The monthly fee is understandable because it’s the only way they’ll be able to afford to constantly maintain the program. $97 per month is heavy though, and in a world where all of your work can be wiped out overnight by a Google ban or a court order to shut down the web site, I decided to pass on SENuke.

What’s worse is that the people I talk to who are also using it, haven’t really been thrilled with results either. That’s why SENuke gets a 4/10, and for falling below the half way mark, is going on the shit list.

I’ve linked to it because I’m not claiming to be perfect or an expert on the program. It may help you, but this type of thing doesn’t fit my business model because it’s public and anybody can screw with it, including employees of businesses that would like it shut down.