Rob Hughes
UK Based SEO,  Genius  and Developer

Blackhat

1. Bit.ly test has been stopped

   A few months ago there was a tweet (and I believe a blog post) by Dave Naylor on the exploitation or URL shorteners in general, specifically bit.ly (as that was the example he used).

   On seeing this I decided to sit down and see what I could find out about further ways to ‘influence’ these URL shortners to send me more traffic and to possibly impact on crawl times and as such rankings.

   On 24^th September 2009 I decided on how I should do this and implemented it straight away.

   I’m not going to give exact details out there of what I did because there are probably URL shorteners out there that are allowing this, it would be silly for me to give away this note without trying to test it a bit further

   (In fact I know there are URL shortners out there that still allow this because I just found one, but that’s a story for another day).

   The graph below shows the instant clicks that I received from testing this (without mentioning this test anyway, not even verbally):

   

   Unfortunately, as can be seen on the 23^rd December 2009 all this traffic instantaneously stopped!

   Not ideal as at this point I wasn’t checking it as much as I should have done and had no idea that this had happened and as such wasn’t able to do an instant check of my logs and traffic to see if any impact was made (hence why I’m not in the best of moods today because I have just ruined a lot of the benefits of the test)..

   In case you think that this test was more of a “blackhat SEO exploitation” rather than an actual test – it wasn’t – what more is there to say about it. It was purely a test to see if increased traffic and crawlability would affect my rankings in one way or another.

   From a quick (very unscientific) look at my statistics, etc. I would have to say that this has worked in the way it was supposed to, but, without a more in detail look, which I’ll be doing at some point this week, it’s hard to come up with any hard evidence.

   I don’t normally want to share methods I’ve used to try and test things like this with the public because, as everybody knows, anything you find and then share reduces your competitive advantage… in this case though, I’m not really giving away any details that people can’t work out for themselves – I just wanted to post something up that gave an example of some of the tests that I am running in the background.

   **EDIT**
   I decided to go back and search for the exact posts on Dave Naylors blog so that I could add in the links that he deserves

2. Dofollow Links on Twitter

   Well, unfortunately I got told I shouldn’t post this when I wanted to buy a friend, but now it appears that some sites have already published it so I might as well – I wrote this post on about 28th July.

   Right I’m still not sure I agree with all this nofollow and dofollow rage on links and I believe in their importance, however, since there is no proof that I’ve seen to show that what Matt Cutts has said isn’t true at the moment I’ll go along with it!

   So, this is a pretty simple thing to do, and it’s pretty easy to notice as well so I presume many people have already considered doing something along this line – I’ve not seen it written up anywhere though so thought I’d document it myself

   I did actually notice this quite a while ago, I sent an email around the middle of June to a couple of guys at work as they hadn’t seen it, even though I had spotted it a month or so before then just wasn’t sure if anybody would care!

   Ok, I’m still probably miles behind the time here, but I’ve not been actively posting and looking for twitter plugins for a great deal of time.

   Ok, so rather than re-writing it again I might as well post the email up as it says it all:

   Hey,

   I’ve found a way somebody could “exploit” twitter’s nofollow attribute if you are interested (I know how you feel about nofollow and follow links).

   Anyway, if you make a twitter update from a plugin of some sort, whether browser, mobile, website, etc. it gives a follow link to what made the post…

   I made a post from a plugin within my WP blog which has given me a follow link to my website – the anchor text can also be manipulated through the plugin settings on the blog itself.

   I thought even though you aren’t here you might like to hear my random thought of the day!!

   Have fun,
   Rob

   That pretty much says it all to be honest, but just to show that this does actually work, this is an email I recently got from Google Alerts:

   Google Web Alert for: link:www.robh.me

   Rob Hughes (_robh_) on Twitter
   Decided to change the styling on my twitter profile… don’t like the colour of the normal text but can’t decide what to pick at the moment!4:08 AM Jul 10th …
   ________________________________________
   This as-it-happens Google Alert is brought to you by Google.

   Remove this alert.
   Create another alert.
   Manage your alerts.

   This is the link documented been seen in Google (no cocky responses about it being the only link there, I have never and am still not motivated to try and get links to my blog because, apart from this post, I never really post anything that I care if people read or not!)

   link:www.robh.me

   This is the Tweet that was associated with the link strangely as there is no link on this tweet:

   http://twitter.com/_robh_/status/2566535015

   Here is an example of a dofollow link from my twitter:

   http://twitter.com/_robh_/status/2842997329

   Well, there we go, that’s pretty much the culmination of what can be done – I personally don’t agree with using this technique and would class it as “blackhat SEO”.

   I thought I should publish this post so that at least everybody that reads here (not many people admittedly) would be aware of this fact and then hopefully Twitter would make a modification so that people can no longer exploit them for links in this way.

   I presume Twitter will combat this soon after people start majorly taking advantage of this, they seem to be pretty quick on the uptake so far with things like this!

   Unrelated Paragraph:

   The annoying thing for me really is that I’ve changed the URL of my blog, so now all these links are getting created they do my little good anyway as the whole domain www.robh.me is just 301 redirected to www.falconpunch.co.uk anyway! (I really need to go my links on my site as well and make sure they are pointing to the right place).