I wanted to call the post “Website Scraper, Trackback Spammer and Cloaking Bundle” at first, but then thought that the current one is a bit funnier, which is a bit more appropriate considering the irony, which will become apparent in a little bit.
Back in March when I did some research for my post about some rogue affiliate examples at ReveNews.com I did stumble across a company who is selling a service that I would summarize as a search engine spamming toolset. The name of the company is Simplifiedsec.
I revisited the issue recently for a follow up post and discovered a video on the company’s website that demonstrates what they are doing and how their tools work from a user perspective.
Here is a screenshot with link to the video, which Loren might replace with the embedded version of the video a bit later.
Here is the link to the video at Google Video, which I created from the original Shockwave video on their website. The original SWF file can be downloaded here (link is using nofollow).
Some of the “highlights” are IP delivery (cloaking) to serve search engine robots different content than to the user who visits the site, flexible redirection of a visitor of a spam website to the target website, which could be an ecommerce site or a site that offers other products and services (this practice is called “bait and switch”).
The software generates sites based on scraped content based on targeted terms and phrases and related phrases, which the tool automatically determines to be able to simulate to the search engines the appropriate theme of the site and to avoid to trigger spam filters that usually detect normal scraped and then keyword stuffed content. It uses things like a CJ keyword scraper (Commission Junction), Google suggest and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) to build pages based on scraped results from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Wikipedia or any RSS feed (supports unlimited feeds), such as the digg.com RSS feed, which they used in the demonstration.
It has bad words filters that work similar to the negative words used in paid search campaigns to make sure that the content generated is as targeted as possible without attracting poor quality and unrelated traffic.
In addition to generate content sites based on scraped material, related keyword phrases and sentences generated by using LSI algorithms, supports the tool “nice” things like .EDU spamming, Blog Pings and Trackback spamming.
The tool has the option to forbid non-referral traffic and supports IP Blocking (to block other scrapers, can you believe it?!).
Comments
They are in business for well over one year and provide their software as either an ASP solution for a monthly subscription fee or sell the whole thing as software page that you can install it on your own server. It is designed to manage hundreds or even thousands of sites and if you look at their website and the video you get the impression that there are selling some kind of next generation content management system and not spam producing and deceiving software that not only violates any search engines webmaster guidelines, but also copyright laws, not to mention that what it does is unethical.
That they are in business for such a long time shows that they seem to have success with their product. I think that this kind of stuff is a much greater threat to search engines than the hypocritical statements regarding paid links and the punishment of guilty and innocent webmasters. The latter use at least common business sense and moral to run their website and at least try to produce some noteworthy content that is meant to be read by humans and not just to feed words as fodder to search engines without the intend to have a human ever look at it.
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet marketer, entrepreneur and owner of the internet marketing resources portal at cumbrowski.com, for example: Keyword Research 101.
or Buzz it at Yahoo :
Comments
17 responses so far ↓
Jeremy Luebke on Jan 6, 2008 at 10:11 pm
I disagree. While these systems are spammier than paid links, they are easy to detect and only get very long term traffic while paid links affect main stream searches that draw public attention.
Adam Maywald on Jan 6, 2008 at 10:21 pm
I was subscribed to Simplified SEC for a little while 18 months ago. They’ve really beefed up there system since then. You can also add your own templates, removing any type of “footprints”.
Halfdeck on Jan 6, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Simplified SEC is on equal footing with PPP or TLA in that both are monetizing on a demand that potentially adds noise to search results. There also is no need to justify a black hat practice by comparing it to something else; by that logic, we should not spend any tax dollars on criminals that only killed once and instead just focus on convicting mass murderers.
Chris Estes on Jan 7, 2008 at 1:05 am
I don’t think I will be running out to buy their software.
Google is setting out to reduce this type of practice. Wait, I think they already adjusted the algorithm to detect cloaking! And the linking schemes.
With every adjustment someone else makes an adjustment and there the spam is again.
I hate spam and I am doing my part to beat it.
Matt on Jan 7, 2008 at 1:34 am
I remember reading a forum post from these guys… something about earning $60000 in 6 weeks using their software. l ink: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=176646
Looks like it kind of fizzled out in the end with the company not updating their blog past the second week…?
CarstenCumbrowski on Jan 7, 2008 at 2:28 am
“There also is no need to justify a black hat practice by comparing it to something else; by that logic, we should not spend any tax dollars on criminals that only killed once and instead just focus on convicting mass murderers.”
I don’t “justify” anything, just to get this out of the way. Now…
The problem is that Google is not spending its dollars on murderers, but people who look like murderers based on more or less accurate profiling.
It’s like with Arabs and airport security. The system has a tendency to pick at random mostly Arab-looking people for the detailed examination. A Swiss friend of mine who happens to look a bit like an Arab , but isn’t, he is Swiss with some Italian blood, can tell you “how lucky” he is to be picked constantly for detailed searches.
The problem is that in our case (big G) they don’t stop at searching, they shoot, preemptively of course. This is not an assumption, I know, but I won’t talk about it, at least not for now.
Amit on Jan 7, 2008 at 12:45 pm
These blackhat tools are everywhere now, Many splog softwares are sold these days that scrape content from muliple sources, then you also have these content spinners, search engine cloakers and so on. So It will be a tough times for the search engines and these black hats are pulling good amount of money.
res on Jan 8, 2008 at 6:35 am
first of all you need to go back and read that site again.. they do not show different content to people and to the bots…
they simply redirect or show content. nothing hidden. and other stuff you have mentioned is not right.. so go to and read it over again..
Unethical and Getting Paid on Jan 8, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Don’t be jealousy.
CarstenCumbrowski on Jan 8, 2008 at 8:15 pm
res, which part of the IP-Delivery feature did I miss?
Adam Maywald on Jan 9, 2008 at 1:09 am
@res - I’ve used the software. Uhm…they cloak. Decently too.
@Amit - It’s always been tough for search engines, well, everyone but Google. I do think they’re getting better, especially with clipping spun content regurg sites. Blackhats are always changing and evolving, if its not cloaking via IP-delivery and spamming every type of bookmark sites (…and so on) then it will be something else in a month.
I one thing I do like about blackhats is the amount of data they get to see. They’re pushing out SO MUCH stuff, they get to see a high level view on what’s going with rankings, link building, on-page factors, etc… Throw up a test with 50 in a couple of hours and you can make your own tests in a couple of weeks. That’s pretty powerful.
I forgot who said it, but I always love whoever said it - “A blackhat could outrank a white hat developing a whitehat site anyday.”
CarstenCumbrowski on Jan 12, 2008 at 5:01 am
“A black-hat could outrank a white hat developing a white-hat site any day.”
add to that
“The only hard part for the black hat is to keep it that way.”
The sprinter probably leads the long distance runner during the first few hundred yards, but this will change after a mile or two.
Rif Chia on Jan 12, 2008 at 2:47 pm
This is simply cheating the spiders into believing that the sites provide new content every now and then. These type of SEO results will never last permanent. I still do not understand why there are still so many websites that are going for such black hat methods and be at th risk of penalizing by Google for these non-permanent results.
Toolbe Webmaster Seo Search Engine on Jan 24, 2008 at 1:11 pm
i hate spam as well, but what can we do /:
Goran Giertz - Website Marketing on Jan 27, 2008 at 7:39 am
It makes it difficult for us to sometimes compete. But the long term benefit of a stable white hat strategy is worth far more then the immediate gains of a black hat.
Jacques Snyman for SEO Results on Feb 5, 2008 at 2:36 am
Black Hat practise will always feature and evolve as search engine algorithms evolve…however as the AI gets more human it will be increasingly difficult. Smoke and mirrors anyone?
Automotive Social Network on May 25, 2008 at 8:13 pm
So many black hat seo techniques around.
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