As long time readers will know, I’ve mainly used Digerati as a platform to publish articles on the more techy and blackhat side of SEO. This may not suit everyone, but it’s really something that interested me enough to post from a personal perspective.

Those of you that really pay attention will know I’m a director at Further Search Marketing. Further have just put their new website live, which we’re making inroads to have a really decent SEO Blog.

If you’ve enjoyed my writing style and content so far, it may be worth you subscribing to the Further SEO Blog, as I’ll be posting there more regularly than on Digerati.

I’ve already done what I would consider two, “good” posts:

Banned in Google? The Complete Guide: This article is aimed for those who have suffered a penalty or ban in Google and how to get listed again as quickly as possible.

The Google Sitelinks Guide – This is (as far as I’m aware) one of the most detailed posts on Google Sitelinks, how they work, how you can get them and what effect they seem to have on your site.

The posts on Further will be more business orientated, with less technical focus, but just as much detail (but less swearing).

So, if you’ve been an avid reader of Digerati, you can get more on your browser or in your reader.

Do it (:

I’ve never done a round-up of the blogs I read before, which I guess is a bit selfish. So, in no particular order (and this isn’t a complete list) some of my favourite blogs, if you’re looking for some inspiration.

Dark SEO Programming is run by Harry. As he puts it, “SEO Tools. I make ‘em”. A great guy if you need help with coding and somewhat of a captcha guru, with a sense of humour. Definitely worth keeping up with. I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy starts making big Google waves in the next few years.

Ask Apache is a blog I absolutely love. Great, detailed tutorials on script optimisation, advanced SEO and mod_rewrite. AskApache’s blog posts are the kind of ones that live in your bookmarks, rather than your RSS Reader.

Andrew Girdwood is a great chap from BigMouthMedia I met last year (although I very much doubt he remembers that). Andrew seems to be a vigilante web bug hunter. What I like about his blog is that he is usually the first to find weird things with Google that are going down. This usually gets my brain rolling in the right direction of my next nefarious plan. ^_^

Blackhat SEO Blog run by busin3ss is always worth checking out. He was even kind enough to give me a pre-release copy of YACG mass installer to review (it’s coming soon – I’m still playing!). Apart from his excellent tools, his blog features the darker side of link building, which of course, interests me greatly.

Kooshy is a blog run by a guy I know, who.. Well I think he wants to remain anonymous (at least a little). He’s just got started again after closing down his last blog and moving Internet personas (doesn’t the mystery just rivet you?). Anyway, get in early, I think we can expect some good stuff from here. He’s already done a cool post on Pimpin’ Duplicate Content For Links.

Jon Waraas is run by.. Can you guess? Jon has something that a lot of even really smart Internet entrepreneurs are missing, good old fashioned elbow grease. This guy is a workaholic and it pays off in a big way. Apart from time saving posts on loads of different ways to monetise your site, build backlinks and flush out your competitors I get quite a lot of inspiration for his constant stream of effort and ideas. I could definitely take a leaf out of his work ethic book.

Blue Hat SEO is becoming one of the usual suspects really. If you’re here, you probably already know about Eli. Being part of my “let’s only do a post every few months club”, I love Eli’s blog because there is absolutely no fluff. He gets straight down to the business of overthrowing Wikipedia, exploiting social media and answering specific SEO questions. You’ll struggle to find higher quality out there.

SEO Book is probably the most “famous” blog I’m going to mention here. Aaron was off at a disadvantage, because to be honest, I thought he was a massive waste of space for quite a while. (I guess that’s what happens when you take your SEO youth on Sitepoint listening to the people with xx,xxx posts on there). I bought his SEO Book and for me, at least, it was way too fluffy. I’m pleased he’s started an SEO training service now as it represents much better value. I’m sure he was making a lot of money from his SEO Book, but perhaps milked it too long (like I probably would have). Anyway, I kept with his blog and I’ve been impressed with his attitude and posts. He’s done some really cool stuff, like the SEO Mindmap and more recently, a keyword strategy flowchart which would be useful for those looking to a more structured search approach. He’s also written about algorithm weightings for different types of keywords and of course has some useful SEO Tools.

Slightly Shady SEO – Great name, great blog. Although XMCP will probably take it as an insult, I’ve always regarded Slightly Shady as the blog most similar to mine on this list. Maybe it’s because I wish I’d written some of the posts he has, before he did, hehe. Again, a no BS approach to effective SEO, whether he’s writing about Google’s User Data Empire, hiding from it or site automation it’s all gravy.

The Google Cache is a great blog for analytical approaches to SEO. There are some awesome posts on Advanced Whitehat SEO and using proxies with search position trackers. I like.

SEOcracy is run by a lovely database overlord called Rob. Rob’s a cool guy, he was kind enough to donate some databases to include in the Digerati Blackbox a while back. Most of his databases are stashed away in his content club now, which is well worth a look in. He’s also done some enlightening posts on keyword research, stuffing website inputs and Google Hacking.

This is all I’ve got time for now, apologies if I’ve missed you. There may be a Part II in the near future.

I thought such a big update was worth a post. Pretty happy with the DoFollow search engine now – well over 1,000 blogs & forums in the index. So, get link building…

Or, if you’re smart write an app to interface with the DoFollow search engine and do it all for you (:

Oh….My…..

I’m aware this is the longest I’ve been without posting, but, meh. What ya gonna do?

I’ve had a post in drafts for a while, which isn’t quite finished. I’ll most likely be polishing and posting it tomorrow. Some real simple blackhat stuff, how to set up a few automated blogs and socially promote content to get some easy pocket money.

To my dear Elite SEO Tools subscribers. Yes, the service has been canned for now. As those of you “on the inside” saw, I was giving membership subscriptions free for the last few months as we were having problems with Social Storm. Unfortunately, several systems such as Propeller, OnlyWire and a couple of other APIs have significantly changed since launch. Nothing that couldn’t be met with a concerted effort – but something I really don’t have time to continue supporting at the moment.

I was *incredibly* pleased with the feedback from the SEO Tools – with several members signing up for multiple accounts as they were so happy with the results! The most popular tool (as I suspected) was Link Buster: which was a set of methods to automatically generate links. I will most likely look at developing a more extensive version of this in 2008, which will focus on links alone – as it seems to be what most people are having problems with.

As for the social media side – AutoStumble is flying! If you check the site out, I’ve added (at the top – squint) a live counter for the amount of stumbles swapped on the network. We are fast approaching 200,000 votes swapped – which is awesome! Like the SEO Tools, I’ve had excellent feedback from both direct feedback and forum chatter. Of course, there’s a few moaners (or as Aaron Wall calls them – Wankers), which does happen when you are at the “lower” price point with software – but hey, generally looking great…

With such great support and feedback, I am looking to develop AutoStumble to allow automatic account creation on StumbleUpon (yes, that means beating reCAPTCHA) and posting against multiple URLs…

Anyway, that’s the news – watch out for the post tomorrow.

Harry from darkseoprogramming kindly pointed out to me that there is a guide to installing and running Autostumble under Linux.

Here is is: [and here is the original]

Step 1. Install Wine

Install Wine from your package manager. Under Debian/Ubuntu it’s simple.
apt-get install wine

Step 2. Download and install Mono for Windows under Wine

If you try to run autostumbler with Wine it will complain that you don’t have the mono libraries installed. So run over to go-mono.com and download the Windows version with GTK and XSP (about 70megs).

Once the download is finished, run the installer under wine.
wine mono-1.9.1-gtksharp-2.10.4-win32-2.exe

Step 3. Install GDI Plus library

Supposedly Wine doesn’t provide some library that autostumbler requires (GDIPlus), so you’re going to have to download and extract it into your wine/drive_c/windows/system32 folder (usually hidden under ~/.wine).

After the DLL is extracted, run winecfg and under the “libraries tab” find the gdiplus library and “Add” it.

Step 4. Profit!

You should now be able to run AutoStumbler under Linux with Wine!
wine autostumbler1.exe

Input your AS user/pass, stumbler user/pass your URL of choice and hit “AutoStumble” and you should be good to go.

Sidenode:
It doesn’t appear to like to be minimized, so just don’t do it . I have a feeling it’s still working while it’s minimized, but I lose the ability to see what’s going on.

Don’t know who wrote this guide, but thanks!