fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

A Happy New Year to all our readers! May your business ventures be successful and may health and well being your life and that of your loved ones! So why not start making it happen by getting a free .com, .net, .org, .info and/or .us domain?

Here’s a friendly heads up by way of a Season’s gift to our esteemed readers, offering a sneak peak behind the scenes of what’s brewing in the sinister clandestine developer labs of modern bad ass Black Hat SEO: Mosaic Cloaking is essentially componentized IP-Delivery - a highly sophisticated and fairly complex technology that will enable black hat SEOs to truly push the envelope in terms of well nigh undetectable cloaking/IP delivery to an unprecedented degree of efficiency. It will also effectively dissolve the hitherto clear cut borders between cloaked and non-cloaked pages - Web 3.0 at its very best

As search engines have come to rely more and more on inlinks rather than on-site factors, they’ve become a lot smarter in determining artificial linking patterns, too. Meaning that you can’t reasonably expect any success in competitive niches if you’re still relying on your 1990s linking techniques

Wiep Knol has released the results of his survey on link value factors as seen by a slew of well known professional SEOs such as Eric Ward, Aaron Wall, Jim Boykin, Barry Schwartz, Peter da Vanzo and Joost de Valk, not to forget the ever helpful Michael Martinez as well as relatively new but highly competent and well-regarded names such as Hamlet Batista and lots of others. What’s interesting about the results isn’t merely the overall metrics - it’s the individual comments on various questions such as the perceived linkjuice power of .edu and .gov domains, the value of anchor texts, linking sites’ topicality, authority status, and more

The decline of the dollar has been hitting European vendors and producers selling stuff in the dollar space pretty hard recently. Being based in Belgium, we’re no exception, and so we’ll regrettably have to raise prices for some of our products from midnight tonight

What’s up in terms of spamming and hacking at Google’s all-time darling, Wikipedia? Essentially, it’s the old Dmoz story all over again: A long, sordid tale of broken dreams, tainted trust, misguided zeal, faked concerns and, barring politics, some of the sleaziest social engineering extant.

It’s been a long standing assertion amongst the A-list members of the SEO community that PageRank does not equate with ranking: Too many low PR sites hitting top spots in the SERPs, outdoing their high PR competitors, it’s really hard to come to any different conclusion. However, now there’s a statistical study determining PR evolution in the Google SERPs over the past 6 months and analyzing the correlation between PR and rankings, offering some interesting conclusions

Isn’t it funny how prophecies have a knack of coming true sometimes? One month ago we did a cartoon taking a shot at Google’s hypocritical FUD tactics regarding paid links by fantasizing about what a pair of hardnosed mobsters would do to take advantage of this positively silly state of affairs. Now, it seems that a high profile company like Shopzilla has actually started to pay for link removal!

If you’ve fallen for the prevailing view that a social networking setup like Twitter is of no practical use unless you’re an exhibitionist attention whore, perhaps, think again. There’s actually a lot more to it, provided you’re prepared to venture on untrodden ground.

Here’s a “Link Building 101 in 2 Minutes” video that will save you tons of time and money.

The first reports are in and subscribers have begun making serious money only hours after purchase: Seems that Google Payload is a real bigtime winner on all fronts. However, there’s even more news - some good, some bad

Installing Wordpress blogs on a mass scale is onechore you’d rather want to avoid. It can be daunting enough on a one-time basis, especially if you’re not of a technical bend, but rolling out tens, hundreds or even thousands of WP blogs positively sucks if you have to do it manually. Now, there’s a no-brainer solution available - and at a 25% discount, too, with our special promo code

Reports outlining PPC traffic arbitrage are a dime a dozen these days and we’ve read them all. But this one’s different - hugely, critically different, in fact. If you’re into monetizing the obscenely huge gap between different traffic sources at all, there’s a number of very important things to consider.

Quite a few blogs haven’t yet implemented the dreaded “nofollow” tag on comment links. While comments on these blogs will pass link juice nicely, there’s a snag: How are you going to find them? This ultra cheap software cuts it down to a single-click action

Search industry watchdogs have noticed an ongoing radical slashing of many (former) darlings’ PR values. It’s happening across the board and has hit a slew of previously high PR rated sites. Is this a consequence of Google’s clamping down on link sellers? Not everyone seems to think so.