Outing a scumbag black hat spammer content thief

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 27, 2007 in Web spam

There are two kinds of black hats in this industry: Those whom I respect because they show some common sense and those who are stupid enough to piss me off.

This idiot openly shares his secret by demonstrating how he scrapes SEO Theory and other SEO blogs.

I left a comment that was awaiting moderation. It said, “If you’re going to play the black hat spammer game, it’s probably not a good idea to scrape the blogs of people who are engaged in search engine optimization.”

This script leaves a pretty clear footprint. I would not advise anyone to use it or to scrape SEO Theory’s content. You sure as heck don’t want to admit to it in pubilc.

I know there are black hats reading this blog. I see the referral data to the paid-registration only forums. You guys are welcome to browse and even to comment but you are NOT welcome to take this content.

3 Comments on Outing a scumbag black hat spammer content thief

By dink on August 27, 2007 at 5:10 pm

- - sigh - -

So many knuckleheads, so little common sense.

Mr. Martinez, your content is much too valuable to have an idiot scrape and post it. Especially if there happened to be a real readership on that site. (I have enough competition, thank you.)

Good work on the outing, too.

By Lorirose on August 27, 2007 at 6:07 pm

Wonder if Johan added his/ her disclaimer before or after your commentary? LOL!
Have you seen his response? Nice. Ha!

By Michael Martinez on August 28, 2007 at 8:28 am

I think the disclaimer was there before I made my post. Doesn’t matter. He is sharing information about a script that uses the SEO Theory feed (which as many of you know is NOT a full feed — and that script is only one of several reasons why I don’t want to offer a full feed).

I don’t want to be at war with the black hat community. But I’ll appreciate people in that community drawing a line where SEO Theory is concerned.

Comment

Log in or Register to post a comment.

More

Read more posts by Michael Martinez

About the Author

Michael Martinez is the Director of Search Strategies for Visible Technologies, Inc. A former moderator at SEO forums such as JimWorld an Spider-food, Michael has been active in search engine optimization since 1998 and Web site design and promotion since 1996. Michael was a regular contributor to Suite101 (1998-2003) and SEOmoz (2006).

Utility snippets and incidental links Why SEO certification fails and how to fix the problem