Footprints Fingerprints Tells and Paranoia

If you aspire to be in the Blackhat SEO game there are a few gotchas you need to avoid, and a serious need for caution. A trap is a trap, but you needn’t fall into one of your own making.

• Paranoia: A belief that someone (or everyone) is out to do you harm.
• Tells: A term used by professional gamblers to describe a way to determine if the opponent is bluffing or has the real deal. The ‘tell’ could be a facial expression, tic, eye movement, or other body language change.
• Fingerprints: Something that uniquely identifies someone or something.
• Footprints: Something that identifies a group of like individuals or items.

For our purposes, a footprint is something (or a group of somethings) that will inform a curious person that your website is of the Blackhat persuasion.

The most common footprint is the generic template that comes with page generation software. Do Not Use The Template That Came With Your Software For Production Websites! The search engine spam hunters will see it and ban your site before you can get enough backlinks to see it in the index. Free templates abound. I may even put up a few on this site (if I thought anyone needed them).

The next most common footprint is the ‘powered by xxxxx’ at the bottom of the page. Get rid of that. Look your template over in your favorite text editor. If you see anything that says something like: generated by…, site design by…., images provided by…., get rid of them.

The best bet is to write your own templates. It isn’t really hard. Just open two windows of your text editor, look at the template that was provided with your software. You’ll soon see that code that you need on your page and the code that makes the page. Code your own template and avoid this sort of trap.

Fingerprints in the Blackhat world, or even in the greyhat world, allow a persistent searcher to put the ‘kick me’ sign squarely between your eyes.

The most obvious of fingerprints are your id number or username in your advertising. The same adsense id on 2,300 spam sites is a dead give away. And, easy to find all of them with a simple search algo. Yep, your user name on affiliate advertising is in the same league.

Another fingerprint is your dns information. It’s all right there for anyone with the right tools to see.

Fingerprints are not as easily camouflaged as footprints are. The subject is maybe too complicated to go into now. We’ll see about posting some potential solutions in another post.

A tell for website could be: way too many links coming in way too close together, too many high pr links and not a lot of low pr links, all recip links, links for sites known to sell links, a domain name with 47 dashes in it, or a domain with 32 subdomains in the page name.

In other words, a tell is a red flag to determined (or even casual) investigators. Be cautious. It can get you banned before you get started good.

Paranoia. What can I say? If you aren’t a little paranoid, you’re a better character than I. “They” are out to get you.

They includes the search engine spam hunters, the self righteous dogooders (they think they’re white hats—but they aren’t), your competitors, and possibly governmental entities.

To combat these “they” folks, you just have to cover your tracks as best you can. Be warned….a determined adversary will find out all there is to know about your site.

There is a very convincing school of thought about the entire subject of this post. Well, it has me convinced. I call it The Hikers and Hungry Grizzly Solution.

There is a story of two hikers. They turned a corner on the path and came face to face with a raging bear. “Run”, says the first hiker. The second hiker says “Run? You know you can’t out run a grizzly”. The first hiker responds “I don’t have to out run the bear. All I have to do is out run you.”

Therefore, the Hikers and Hungry Grizzly Solution is: Make yourself and your site as inconspicuous as possible. Let the other hikers take the heat from “them”. If you feel the hot breath of the bear on the back of your neck…turn left, drop and cover.

The whole point of this post is….beware of traps. Don’t make the trap that you fall into. Besides being embarrassing, it could cost you a lot.

~dink