yelyah - “the google experiment 20111004” piano improv
I realized today that it was thanks to twitter treating me like I was a spammer that I ended up (through a google search) finding out about this whole method of site promotion called “black hat SEO”.
Truth be told, I’ve basically given up on twitter. I came up with this whole project to do severe weather alerts on a state by state basis (as opposed to the national account that was already in place). Little did I know that it was an exercise in futility (unless you count the experience gained with tools like resque).
Accounts got falsely blocked and going through twitter’s incompetent support system ended up being more hassle than it was worth. They’d unblock me every time with no explanation of what I could do to prevent further bans and I’d end up just getting blocked again. Repeat ad nauseam.
Meanwhile I was getting near constant spam on my twitter accounts. Spam that had a very clear pattern. Spam that could’ve been easily caught by a pretty unintelligent filter, but wasn’t. Yet my legit project continued to get the ban hammer. I wasn’t happy to say the least.
So when the next round of bans went through, I just said eff it and haven’t cared since.
So here’s the larger moral of that story:
don’t spend a bunch of time on a project that relies on a third party’s service
But I realized that there was an upside. Through this experience I learned about one of the black hat SEO forums (you’ll know you’re on the right site if the design makes your eyes bleed), and it’s chock-full of random, strange ways to make money.
Now I’ll say some of the methods aren’t so user friendly. Take, for instance, the content locker. This is where you have a download (like an ebook) that’s “locked”, forcing the user to complete some offer first (for instance, taking a survey) and only after that can they get access to the content. And then you the owner of the content locker get money.
Some of the methods are kind of spammy and some are outright spam, but to be honest, I find it kind of fascinating to be on other side of the spam equation for once. To peek behind the curtain, so to speak. I use “spam” in the general sense here. This isn’t sending spam email but things such as autoblogs.
And on the subject of autoblogs, I’ve come to realize that wickedwx is really just a super sophisticated autoblog. And what I find ironic, or just plain crazy, is that severe weather outlook, which falls way more under the autoblog definition, actually has a higher PageRank than the site it’s based on.
But to tie all of this into the song name, the google experiment is to see if I can rank for this:
Spencer likes Honeycombs.
If you google it, you’ll see where I got the idea.
