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

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.