Who the hell does Quadzilla think he is?

Notes from the Webmaster Radio show, Net Income, hosted by Shoemoney with guest Quadzilla.

You can get the show at seoblackhat.com in podcast format.

First let me start by saying I love Quadzilla and his blog at seoblackhat.com The guy does not bullshit, does not waffle, he’s as bright as a button and got a good sense of humour. It’s just that he inhabits the dark side.

Here are my notes from the show. Mainly for my own use, but might as well share. There may be errors and ommisions, I suggest you listen to the show to clarifly,

Quadzilla History

Stockbroker
Venture capital
Sales

Internet marketing to go portable.
The desire not to work for the man.
Started in 2004

Once black hat never going back? (question from the chat room)
Never say never.
Pragmatic about algos
Gaming search engines is appealing.

Quadzilla makes money in the black hat space of search engine optimisation.

Shoemoney describes himself as a white hat.

Black hat is not illegal. It’s more advanced than white hat.
Black hat is more technical

Min Max the algos
How can we take what works for 10c to make it make a million

Simple problem and throwing a lot at it..

If something works to a very small degree what happens if we do it a million times.
Find what works, then murder it. When it stops working, stop and do something else.

Getting rid of Adsense will get rid of web spam

Google is reactive, filters their algo to achieve results.

Quadzilla will not reveal his black hat spam sites to Matt Cutts 😉

Quad has More than a 1,000 domains and less than 100,000

Quad has corporate clients.
Blue chip hires black hat

Concepts in black hat can apply in white hat.
Find something that works before they know how to ban it.
Before they even give it a name.

How would you go white hat
Buy an established website and improve the content
He would make less as a white hat.

Changes may come through law.
Particularly with the present knee jerk administration

Most efficient black hat technique.
What works a year ago will not work now.

Parasite hosting
Piggybacking on trusted sites via a redirect.

Ban blogger from the serps to improve the spam problem.

Quadzilla does not get involved in PPC.
Click fraud is not what quad is comfortable with.
Respectable black hats do get involved in click fraud.

You can make a ton of money in white hat ppc, you just need the right tracking software and the right traffic.

Bid shadowing is not black hat, it’s just playing the game correctly.
There are mystical things that make up the Google AdWords algo

Black hat techniques do not get any link love on the blog so he has stopped posting techniques.

Shoe builds a cool service and hopes people come to it. he is sick of hearing seo techniques, better to build quality traffic.
White hat seo takes 4 hours to learn
Title tag
Description tag is back in style
Test keyword density
Sprinkle the keywords
Build a quality product.

He posts blackhat techniques on his forum

No justification for charging a lot of money for white hat seo consulting

Hates the term link bait along with Brian from Copyblogger

Has a lot of respect for Greg Boser. he recommends Greg Boser for seo consultancy.

Prefers .com domain name, even though you pay a premium for a reasonable name, recently paid $25,000 for a domain.

On page optimisation is not trash but it is overrated.

A lot of opportunity to get vanity names from foreign countries like del.icio.us did
Go after short memorable keywords

Shoemoney thinks the name del.icio.us is ridiculous.

A poker site always has a .net name where the free game is and so people type in the name and go to the .com name where the real money is.

Poker is not done as a revenue earner, but will not be back in the US until a few years.

The difference between black hat and out and out click fraud.

Buying a hack site and putting your links in is sometimes described as black hat.

It’s just Min/Maxing the algos to get to get to the top.

How many times does the spam team in Ireland say we can get rid of 80% of spam by getting rid of adsense.

Quadzillas best forms of payment systems is making your own affiliate programme, as you can make affiliate links count for seo. SE are pushing users to the target of the affiliates. Don’t’ use something like CCbill for this.

Payments, wired payments are best. Not a huge fan of paypal and they do not fight hard on charge backs.

Shoemoney likes paypal, but hates the charge backs.

Paypal is basically a bank but not regulated like a bank.

Shoemoney has a guy who can find peoples private stuff if he gets ripped off.

Quad keeps track of techniques, he is given stuff by other people and asks friends to see if something works. When he finds out it works he hammers it.

He is IM’d tips and tricks.
He gives it out the tips to his list and they try it out.

He likes Clicktracks as a metric software.

he customises a lot of metric software, particularly for traffic trades.

Metrics can be a headache with so many domains.

Link bait is white hat seo of the future.

Quadzilla and Shoemoney get asked to do a lot of partnerships.
The best thing you can do is test. Test before showing it to someone.

He has heard that google tracks everything, even gmail. If there is a domain name in it, it may get tracked.

Not comfortable with phishing.

Quad has been banned from adsense and adwords. And questions from affiliate companies. He has problems when a huge amount of traffic goes to an affiliate account.

Shoemoney has experience with this with Commission Junction but tells Azoogle everything and they work with him.

Shoemoney does no black hat apart from a little adwords bot action.

Why show adsense to a bot?
if you are the New York Times you can cloak.
Off topic cloaking is not wanted by google. But cloaking where it is essentially the same theme is not really a problem.

Google no longer allows the use of images to increase clicks, although they have allowed a major hosting site to put hidden text.

You need to worry about yourself breaking the rules and not other people. look at what works for you. look to what see what works and apply it to your business.

Google have hit the tipping point with regards to their size and are starting to get bashed.

Google have not scratched the surface of what they can do.

Trust is supremely important. Don’t start with a fresh domain.
Take a site with some history, some back links and build from there.

You can also listen to the show from Shoemoneys’ blog

Or go to Webmaster Radio direct

“Who the hell does Quadzilla think he is?” was written by Lyndoman aka Lyndon Antcliff