Blackhat SEO

There’s a reason you don’t see spam comments on this blog. It is moderated for all comments, that’s why.

I do notice after each new post is made, a flurry of irrelevant comments appear in the cue awaiting moderation. Invariably some sort of spam (automated) attempts at link farming to boost some other site’s backlink array, blah blah blah.

After a recent very sparse post, 2 such comments appeared in the cue and the backlink address in one of them caught my eye (gscraper.com) so I decided to investigate…

Black Hat SEO Spam

As you can see in the image above, the backlink in one of these comments is gscraper.com. A search on Google brings up a number of links to the domain but I didn’t bite right away since I was skeptical that what appears to be the perpetrator’s resource holds an unbiased answer. Next, I searched on “what is gscraper”. Behold one of the top returns was a youtube video promoting a fairly new application called gscraper.

The video is quite revealing. While the promoter is clearly touting the capabilities of the application to the target audience (Blackhat SEO users), it also has the effect of revealing the current state of their dubious craft to everyone else as well.

Basically the program is used to automate several tasks:
• harvest hundreds of thousands of URLs of blogs with new and recent posts
• spam them all with a generic comment that includes a backlink
• search the list to reveal the comments that got through unhindered
• harvest all of the active posts from the shorter list of open blog URLs
• spam the new filtered list for maximum spam density

Woah! Welcome to the world of “Blackhat SEO”. Sorry pal, oops you’ve scraped the wrong blog.

No doubt, this post will quickly get spammed. Advice to anyone who has a blog out there… “Batten down the hatches”!

January 2012. A new beginning

With a Prosperous 2011 drawing to a close, I began the process of forming a new Business Venture “Engineer LLC“.  With a portion of my earnings from Contract work, I have formed a new LLC organization to serve as a foundation for the several business ventures that I have been incubating or planning over the course of 2011.  Engineer LLC is now operational and forms the new “Parent” organization for several business ventures…

    • Spidersource Unlimited is my vision for a provider of Consumer and Technical Software in the mobile marketplace. It has yet to be officially launched as of this writing.
    • dc-johnson.com was created in January of 2008 in response to an inquiry by a Ferrari restorer and as a tribute to my Father’s invention of aftermarket emission control devices for the Automotive “Grey Market” of the United States in the early 1980s. The site serves as a source of information for owners of these now antique Automobiles. Occasionally, a request comes in for assistance to this site which will now be a division of Engineer LLC.
    • Vernon Johnson Engineering Services has been consulting with private Inventors since 2004 to assist in bringing new inventions to life! Vernon Johnson Engineering Services also occasionally provides Advanced level Computer Networking and Systems Engineering services to Clients with challenging Computer needs.  For the time being, Vernon Johnson Engineering Services will remain independent for existing Consulting contracts.  New Consulting contracts will be fulfilled through Engineer LLC.

There may be other ventures in the future that will emerge as projects or ventures of Engineer LLC as well.

The new web presence for Engineer LLC is hosted by Dreamhost. I have been using them for 7 years (ever since I started publishing public web content) and must say I am a very satisfied customer. This blog you are reading right now is hosted on Dreamhost. If you are considering opening a new web Hosting account, I strongly recommend Dreamhost. Should you choose to use their services, use the promo code NEWUSER2012 and you will get an additional discount when you create a new account with Dreamhost. Full Disclosure: I do receive a small referral fee for referring new customers.

Vernon Johnson

January 24, 2012