BlackHat SEO News & Reviews

There’s a fine line between creating good controversial content and purposefully “link-baiting”. We tend to qualify “link bait” as false outlandish claims made just to get attention, traffic, and of course, links to the site. Many blogs are constantly link-baiting because visitors can be hard to keep on your site.

One of the most successful traffic magnets I’ve seen recently is this ebay auction:

Click Here to See the Controversial Auction

That auction tells the story of a wife who caught her husband in infidelity and is selling the evidence on eBay as she tells the story. (the lover’s panties and the husband’s empty condom package)

I posted this here as an example of the right way to get attention on the internet. It’s an emotional situation that people can relate to with a way to PARTICIPATE. Yes, participation is the code of Web 2.0. Users can interact! Did you notice the Q&A on the ad? It’s hilarious! People were supporting the wife as well, and she told the aftermath.

You can do this kind of thing on purpose, but you’ve got to bring social traffic and it’s got to be so good that people will laugh and share it. This is when you use sites like StumbeUpon, Digg, and Reddit to turn up the heat. Look at the price she got for what is essentially garbage! That’s easy money!

Every time somebody discovers that you can get paid by hosting Google’s Adsense ads on your site (which can be as simple as a free blog on blogger) their eyes get wide and they start to think, “I can click myself to be a millionaire!”

Those poor suckers waste a lot of time trying to cheat the most professional Pay-Per-Click system in the world. Google deals with cheaters every single day, and they have NO MERCY. The fact that they control so many sites makes it especially hard, since they are always looking to protect their advertisers from n00bs who think they are smarter than the strongest web enterprise in the world.

Here are 7 ways Google catches cheaters, so you know you can’t get away with this garbage.

1. If the clicker’s IP address matches the one on the Adsense account it’s a dead giveaway. Google is rabidly frothing at the mouth that you can’t click your own ads…DUH! Google also doesn’t allow too much clicking from IP addresses in the same geographical region…so forget going to your local cyber cafe and clicking like crazy. Don’t go to grandma’s house either, they probably know her IP address and can link it to you.

2. If the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) on your site is high enough that it attracts suspicion (anything 10% or higher raises eyebrows) then you’ll definitely be flagged for investigation into the Adsense Terms of Service and they’ll terminate you on any minute detail. 5% is great and completely normal.

3. Google tracks your account access with cookies. Most people don’t login from the same IP address every time so Google keeps a log of all of the IP addresses you use to see your account, so changing IP addresses from the same computer won’t work either. Forget any kind of lame-wad proxy program you’re thinking of using.

4. Visitor behavior will set you off as well. If your ads are getting clicked before the site loads completely and there’s enough time for the visitor to actually check out the content, then that throws up flags as well. Google tracks the conversions after the click as well, and if your visitors aren’t buying anything, then your traffic will be considered “poor quality” and your account will likely be terminated. Also, if the visitors are only clicking ads on your site and not on others, you’re toast. Google can see all of those patterns.

5. Google can see where visitors are coming from. If people who come to your site naturally don’t click the ads yet everybody from another site or a blank referrer always do, that reveals your little “click exchange” ring or your myspace buddies at click fraud. Forget making your little Adsense mafia, it ain’t gonna work out.

6. Non-sensible traffic patterns are considered suspicious. If your site doesn’t rank well for any trafficked keywords on Google, and it’s obvious you aren’t bringing them from other search engines, it will set off alarms that there’s no sensible traffic source and that you are somehow cheating. You gotta play things straight with your traffic sources.

7. The worst, dumbest, most obvious stupid way is people asking you to “visit the site’s sponsors”. Google’s TOS say you can’t ask people to click, and their search engine indexes all the text on the site. That will turn you in like the punk tattle-tale kid from third grade.

To do well with Adsense, you need to have a great content page. There are some tips and tricks you can use to have a better site, but trying to cheat the system is a waste of time. You should have a white hat site for Google Adsense. Using black hat techniques to get more good targeted traffic is probably your only hope of getting an edge, and for those techniques I recommend you read Project Black Mask.