If you’re not careful when you’re messing around bad neighborhoods, someone might just attempt to bust a cap on yo ass.

That or get you a Google penalty. You can decide for yourself which is worse.

But there is a new type of neighborhood watch out there. It’s called the Bad Neighborhood Text Link Tool. Instead of watching for crooks, burglars, and sexual predators, they protect you from the most heinous of villains - black hat webmasters!

While other webmasters blindly link to these impure websites, you are wise to the hidden text generic Viagra links in the footer. You refrain from linking to them and in return, you get to survive another day in King Google’s land of the internet.

So if you’re buying or selling links through TNX or doing sketchy link exchanges with someone from Nigeria, do a background check first.

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How hard do you think it is to get .gov and .edu links to your site?

If you said hard, super hard, or impossible, you’re wrong. I already uncovered easy and free ways to get .edu links, but now I’ll show you how to get .gov links the easy way. (But note, I didn’t say it’s the cheap way…)

You start the process by reading up on how to qualify for a .gov domain name.

Then just start your own city.

Once that’s taken care of, you can request your .gov domain!

(OK, maybe starting your own city does qualify as “hard” )

But seriously, you might be able to start an organization that is part of your local city government, and end up with a domain name like myorganization.mycity.gov. Or, slightly easier, try to partner with some agency that’s part of your local government. Maybe you can convince them to link to your related website.

Then it just becomes a question of “How much is a .gov link actually worth??”

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Most people believe that Google places extra weight on backlinks from the .edu and .gov TLDs. Just search webmaster forums and you’ll find tons of threads like “WTB: .edu backlinks” along with plenty of people selling them.

I don’t know that anyone has proof of .edu backlinks being any more useful than a .com backlink, but if you want some easy .edu links, all you have to do is use Google…

Put this in Google:

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”you must be logged in” -”comment posting closed” -”comment closed” “keyword”

or

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”you must be logged in” -”comment posting closed” -”comment closed” “internet marketing”

You can just copy and paste that into Google, making sure to change “keyword” to whatever your preferred topic is.

Then you’ll get a list of crappy blogs that have been spammed by tons of webmasters already. But if that doesn’t turn you off, go ahead and make a comment with your link in it!

You could probably do the same thing to look for forums, guestbooks, and other sites where you can leave links. Just switch the “inurl:blog” to “inurl:forum” or “inurl:forums” or other synonyms. Or switch the .edu to .gov, whatever you want.

If you change the search terms enough, maybe you’ll find a good site that hasn’t been spammed way too much already! (But I doubt it.)

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DMOZ doesn’t get the attention it deserves these days. People are going after Wikipedia and the front page of Digg instead. They might have better luck there, but paying people to Digg you gets expensive, and those over-protective nerds editing Wikipedia every second of the day won’t let your link slip past.

But at DMOZ, the editors are corrupt. In 2005 it might have just been one corrupt editor, but now, if anyone is still editing, they’re corrupt beyond relief.

It’s not a bad thing, just a change you have to make in your style

And that change involves greasing some palms (figuratively speaking.) And to help you out, here are the instructions to get it done.

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Bad news for all you comment spammers trying to increase PR for your site - comment links on myspace profiles won’t do you any good. Myspace has implemented a redirect system that takes any external link in a comment and turns it into a redirect. Without a direct link, it’s like your link doesn’t exist.

But the good news for comment spammers is that people might still click the link and end up at your site. You might not get the PR but you’ll still get the traffic (which is more important, IMHO.)

And the bad news for legitimate myspace users is that comment spam is not going to decrease. There are numerous spam comments that don’t even use live hyperlinks anymore, so I doubt that these redirects will slow them down. They will keep spamming as usual and add more obtrusive methods as they find more exploits in Myspace’s code.

I’m really getting sick of it. Lately it seems like 45 of the latest 50 comments on my profile are spam. And it’s mostly from phished accounts.

Will Myspace survive the spammers? Only time will tell.

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