Handsome Logic

In SEO, PPC or any well-covered area of Internet Marketing, there comes a point where your “daily reading” ceases to stimulate you. I, for one, probably breeze past 95% of the posts in my feed reader every morning without a click. Now, because I’m subscribed to far too many feeds, I still end up spending 1-2 hours on average reading the 5% that captures my attention. Whether you’ve reached that point or not, much of the information being bounced back and forth between industry forums and blogs is little more than a “best practices” guide. Much like the stock market, by the time it’s news, the real opportunity is considerably diminished.

So if your white hat RSS subscriptions are no longer forcing you to think, here are 11 Blackhat Blogs you can’t afford to not be reading:

1. Blue Hat SEO

Eli at Blue Hat SEO posts some of the best advanced SEO techniques available for webmaster consumption. Although the blog is not frequently updated, the posts are long and detailed, and a day spent reading his archives would be time well spent. If post titles like…

…Link Saturation w/ Log Link Matching
…Desert Scraping
…Keyword Fluffing
…Link Laundering and
…Introduction to Black Hole SEO

make you salivate just a little, clear your schedule and start reading.

2. SEO Black Hat

If you’ve never heard the name Quadzilla, it’s a good thing you’re reading this post. SEOBlackHat.com not only maintains an active blog of the misadventures and tactics of black hat SEO, but also operates a paid-membership forum that boasts “The Most Cutting-Edge SEO Exploits No One is Publishing”. At $100/mo, forum membership might not be every webmaster’s cup of tea. But the blog is free, which is why you can’t afford not to read it.

3. busin3ss.name

business.name is a great resource on content generation and link building techniques, and the blogging home of the creator of YACG (Yet Another Content Generator). The three largest items in their tag cloud are “exploit”, “edu-spam” and “tools”. ‘Nuff said.

4. syndk8

Earl Grey’s syndk8.net is more of a forum than a blog, though a visit will show you why it made the list. Syndik8 is packed full of gray matter-stimulating user-submitted content from its over 10,000 members. Topics of discussion range from black hat PPC and content scraping to PHP cloaking scripts and more.

5. fantomNews

fantomNews is the blog of webmaster software company fantomas, makers of applications such as the “Shadow Domain Generator” and spiderSpy™ botBase. The blog features a weekly SEO cartoon (fantoOn), as well as posts like “The Spammers Guide to Wikipedia Hacking” and “Wordpress Mass Installer”. While the primary goal of the site is to sell their products, there is sill plenty of valuable and provocative information available free of charge.

6. Oooff.com

Smaxor is a familiar face on the WickedFire forums, as well as (recently) Earners Forum. His blog, oooff.com, is a great place to start if you’re an internet marketer in need of a crash course in PHP. Smaxor has written excellent guides and tutorials, such as “Basic Web Scraping Using PHP and cURL” and “Basic PHP Data Parsing”. Even if you never have a need for PHP (which is rather unlikely), the posts do a great job of illustrating the basic functionality and possibilities of dynamic website programming.

7. Rephraser

Rephraser hasn’t been updated since early October, but started as the chronicles of a webmaster building his own network of spam sites. The most recent post is a guide to understanding the basic forms of black hat link building. The blog started with promising potential and I hope it’s updated soon… but in the meantime, there is enough on the site to make it worth a read for any black hat greenhorn.

8. Seocracy

Seocracy is another WF regular and a great source for quality databases. While his blog doesn’t expressly promote or advocate blackhat techniques, his understanding of them is apparent and his posts are informative and entertaining. Posts about “Google Hacking” give search queries that anyone can use to find proxies, database dumps and more. And his block sucks. Oh wait, is the “Diss My Blog” contest over? If you missed Seocracy’s “Diss My Blog” contest, then you missed out on some of the more humorous linkbait seen in the industry blogosphere. Results and winning contributions are still available on his blog.

9. Linkdump

Linkdump.f0wl.org is choc full of real code and implementation examples that range from content generation to keyword extraction and scraping. The site is the former home of a software application of the same name, which it seems is no longer available.

10. DinkStyle.com

Unlike the common stereotype of a black hat webmaster (AdSense-happy), DinkStyle.com is a blog geared more towards affiliate marketing. What the site may lack in code examples, it more than makes up for in useful tool suggestions and accounts of dink’s real experiences as a blackhat webmaster. Dink doesn’t care for the term “blackhat”, but spends more time ranking than arguing over semantics.

11. Roguespammer

Roguespammer is a relatively new blog, started up in early October. Posts so far have been scattered over a wide range of topics, but watch for upcoming posts about blackhat link building, traffic monetization and Craigslist spamming. The intended focus of the site is methods for acquiring and monetizing traffic from user-generated content sites like classified sites, social networks and wiki’s.