Georgie Casey

I signed up for the paid seoblackhat forums there about a month ago to see what it was all about. It cost $100 which is no chump change and it’s a recurring subscription. I just cancelled it there, some info was alright but not great and I’m off to the States for a month soon so it’d be wasted money. If it was around $20 a month I probably would have kept the sub going.

It has a few select knowledgable members and a lot of noobs asking fairly basic questions trying to get their moneys worth. Quadzilla has a few members being paid or with a vested interest running around trying to answer all the questions. Honestly, nothing there is information not freely available on syndk8 and there’s way better banter and craic on sydk8 as well.

The memberlist tells me there’s 253 members. I say about 220-230 of these are paying. That’s at least $22,000 that Quadzilla’s getting a month. Pretty sweet, fair play to him for thinking of the idea and making it work. But I think it’s crap. My 2 cent.

Things are getting bad (or spammers are getting good) when people have to use captchas like these:

Found on the syndk8 forums

After Google’s recent bad data push that resulted in 5 billion spam pages in the index, a lot of webmasters seem to be accepting the fact that Google is bust and seem to be looking to the dark side of SEO, including me. I registered at syndk8 and have been reading up on all the methods used.

Did you know anybody could get your site banned through a method called Googlebowling? This is where you somehow insert HTML onto the target site that you know will activate Google spam filter, like stuffing keywords in h1 tags. You could this by enterting the HTML in a search box on the target site and then copying the resulting URL.

Then get this URL indexed in Google somehow and there’s a good chance the site will be banned. I can’t see a easy way Google could stamp out this practice without introducing a human element somewhere in the algo. Why bother with white hat when this could happen to your site at anytime?