Targeted blackhat programming class for SEOs

Hey everyone,

wasn't really sure where to post this, apologies in advance if this is the wrong section.

So I've recently been toying with the idea of holding programming classes specifically targeted at SEOs. I find that there are some areas which aren't really touched upon in conventional education (or the stuff you find in books, etc.). Tasks such as automation, web crawling, data minding, etc. are either left out all together or limited to specific domains (machine learning being one).

I strongly believe that everyone (no matter the background) can learn the basics of coding and immensely benefit from this knowledge almost immediately. The field of internet marketing presents ripe opportunities to take advantage of this knowledge, one can design and build their own tailormade scripts to help with (just to name a few) automation related tasks (posting backlinks, creating accounts, etc.), web scraping (gathering data, be it competitor analysis or trend gathering) and much more.

Of course this could be taken much further, advanced classes on for example optical character recognition or building your own "for-sale-tools" could be held if there's enough demand. The sky is, as usual, the limit.

I'm just wondering if there's any interest in this kind of stuff? Other fields (Statistics for example) have already realized the huge potential of introducing programming classes into their regular curriculum, I'm quite sure that other will follow soon enough. To me, marrying coding with internet marketing sounds like a great idea, how about you guys?

I've already started working on some material. I love teaching in general (I do some uni related work part time) and try to contribute to this great community as much as I can. Here are some of my programming related threads:

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...553343-reverse-engineering-googles-algos.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...6011-general-ocr-tut-vector-space-method.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...ts-image-morphology-image-transforms-etc.html

I'd love to contribute some more and am in the process of preparing some new threads and completing some of my old ones.

So what are your thoughts on this? Anybody interested?

EDIT: Just thought of adding that I'm of course very found of anything blackhat and the class would certainly reflect this (think backlink automation, mass registrations, etc.)

What languages will you cover?

Interested sounds great. Pls pm me if you got more infos.

Programming and IM go hand in hand, that is why the for sale section is all software

Always loved your contributions mate.....am already an attentive student of yours

There's already a team from BHW who is doing exact what you're saying. You might want to hookup with them. Their domain is: http://www.greenhatcoding.com/

What languages will you cover?

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Great question. This is by no means set in stone, however I do have certain opinions about which language to choose for this.
I've been coding in C/C++ for about 15 years or so. I've also toyed around with various other languages (some have become my "go-to" languages) including Java, Pascal, Python, Go, lisp (common lisp to be correct), Javascript and some others. For this class I'd like to choose a language (or a set of languages) that satisfies as many of the following conditions as possible:

1. Teaches you some good programming practices (in other words, the language doesn't abstract away too much of the internals) [EDIT for clarity: the language provides enough abstraction to be useful right from the start without introducing a ton of "magic"]
2. Easy to start with (no massive build requirements, good standard tooling)
3. Easy to be productive in (this one is very important. We want to get to the meat as fast as possible. I'm designing the course to dive right into the stuff while learning some of the basics. C++/lisp fail here)
4. Good standard library (again, this refers back to point three. Basically you don't want to reinvent the wheel every time you start coding)
5. Cross-platform/deploy on various architectures

From my point of view two languages really stand out here. These being Go and Python. Both are cross-platform, very easy to start with, easy to be productive in and both provide great libraries (Python in particular) and tooling (Go in particular). Go feels like a much better C (IMHO), it's fast, expressive, allows you to be productive right away, can be compiled to a native binary without dependencies across multiple platform and much more. More importantly both languages are great for scraping, automation, crawling and other internet marketing/SEO related tasks. Secretly I'd of course love to teach you all some lisp, but that would be a rather long course then.

In general I'm of course open to suggestions in regards to languages. I'd like to start with those two for now, others can be added at a later point (I'd consider javascript later on for various reasons not mentioned above)

Interested sounds great. Pls pm me if you got more infos.

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Just subscribe to this thread to keep up. I'd love for us all to figure out the best possible approach to this.

Programming and IM go hand in hand, that is why the for sale section is all software

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Haha, very true statement.

Always loved your contributions mate.....am already an attentive student of yours

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Very much appreciated. I hope to enlighten some more.

the_demon said:

There's already a team from BHW who is doing exact what you're saying. You might want to hookup with them. Their domain is: http://www.greenhatcoding.com/

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I've actually contacted headspin (sp?) before, when I saw his thread about a month ago as I really didn't want to start a "competing" thread, didn't want to "intrude" on his idea. We talked a little and I offered to provide some material in my domain, he said that he'd contact me but never did for whatever reason and thats completely ok of course.

Besides that, and this is just personal opinion again, I don't think .Net or php are great choices here... Further on, from what I understand, their course (I mght be mistaken here, apologies in advance, no disrespect intended) is a series of video tutorials with written material (and probably a ton of related material). I'd personally like to structure my course as a live lecture of sorts. Its certainly less scalable but would result in a more personal experience for the attendees.

All of that being said, I'm still very much open to a collaborative effort.

Hey OP you 're not much of a PHP type - what gives?

I would be interested to know more about this.

I have always looked for someone who would teach me something like this. I would be definitely interested in this! i was actually considering going to some programming class but the classes here suck, they dont tech you they just ask you to "study". Consider me as a highly interested candidate. Please keep this thread posted

I am definitely very interested in the Python part of this.

Also, recently Iwas wondering if we are not wasting many resources on our machines due to the fact that all backlinking tools do have a more or less complex GUI which constantly needs to be updated for the recent output. (GSA SER, Xrumer)

I might be wrong, but I believe if you had a tool with the posting capabilities of the like of Xrumer, but based on CLI only, you would reach a much more efficient utilization of server time and power
A big plus in my eyes would be that these tools could be developed for Linux distros as well, so we don't need to use Windows machines for spamming.

I like the thought of being able to start a link building campaign by just typing
backlinker -config /etc/backlinker/project1.xml -targets /etc/backlinker/lists/guestbooks.txt

The configs could be generated by hand in any editor of your choice, or the developer of the tool could even give you a separate GUI (even web based) to generate a config file.

Any thoughts? I might try to do some proof of concept for one blog or guestbook platform, but my coding sucks. At least, I wanted to kick off some discussion about this topic.

Regards,
Steve

Gophering said:

Great question. This is by no means set in stone, however I do have certain opinions about which language to choose for this.
I've been coding in C/C++ for about 15 years or so. I've also toyed around with various other languages (some have become my "go-to" languages) including Java, Pascal, Python, Go, lisp (common lisp to be correct), Javascript and some others. For this class I'd like to choose a language (or a set of languages) that satisfies as many of the following conditions as possible:

1. Teaches you some good programming practices (in other words, the language doesn't abstract away too much of the internals)
2. Easy to start with (no massive build requirements, good standard tooling)
3. Easy to be productive in (this one is very important. We want to get to the meat as fast as possible. I'm designing the course to dive right into the stuff while learning some of the basics. C++/lisp fail here)
4. Good standard library (again, this refers back to point three. Basically you don't want to reinvent the wheel every time you start coding)
5. Cross-platform/deploy on various architectures

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While you may object to C++, C would be a good alternative. I would like to see the work in C# but using the C model. Cross Platform is not an issue with C# if you use mono. I would walk away from anything in Java for a couple of reasons: insecure, Java was covered in my University classes. PHP would be fine from my perspective, but the abstraction does not meet your requirements. I see the requirements that you present as being more suitable for assembly. I think that assembly based programs might be a bit too much for people here. While antiquated, Pascal (if you can find a compiler these days) would be a good teaching alternative. Abstraction can be avoided, but at some time it would have to be covered. Too much of today's programming relies on abstracted functions not to cover it from a programmers perspective. Abstraction keeps one from reinventing the wheel.

Just my input.

I'm interested

Hey OP you 're not much of a PHP type - what gives?

I would be interested to know more about this.

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Now, I really don't want to start a language flame war here, so keep in mind that all is IMHO.
Tbh, I could go on and on about PHP's bad points (there are of course some positives though), however it all boils down to very, very bad design... It teaches bad habits. I'll give you this link instead, will probably do a much better job of explaining this http://webonastick.com/php.html (be sure to scroll down to the "Other Anti-PHP sites" and take a look at them as well).

While you may object to C++, C would be a good alternative. I would like to see the work in C# but using the C model. Cross Platform is not an issue with C# if you use mono. I would walk away from anything in Java for a couple of reasons: insecure, Java was covered in my University classes. PHP would be fine from my perspective, but the abstraction does not meet your requirements. I see the requirements that you present as being more suitable for assembly. I think that assembly based programs might be a bit too much for people here. While antiquated, Pascal (if you can find a compiler these days) would be a good teaching alternative. Abstraction can be avoided, but at some time it would have to be covered. Too much of today's programming relies on abstracted functions not to cover it from a programmers perspective. Abstraction keeps one from reinventing the wheel.

Just my input.

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C would be quite a terrible alternative honestly. I don't want to spend time teaching memory management and how to handle strings... Also, I want a language that is cross-platform by default. I've had some trouble with Mono in the past and wouldn't really go back (things might have changed of course). .Net developing on anything other than Win is also a pretty terrible experience from my point of view... In general I'd like to present a scripting language and a compiled language in this course, both Python and Go fit this role really well.

Also, I don't think I expressed the "abstraction" part well enough. Go for example offers plenty of abstraction. You can write a static-file server in about 15 lines of code. A full fledged Google scraper in about a 70-100, so the abstraction is there. However, there's no magic involved here. The minute you look at some code you'll understand what it is doing (provided you are familiar with the syntax). So what I really meant is taking a less "Magical" language.

I agree with you on Pascal. However pascal fails at other points in my list, being practical right out of the box and providing modern libraries.
Not really sure where you got the asm idea from... Assembly would be pretty ridiculous considering all of my points above.

So consider that I don't want to teach a general programming class you got books for that, I want to teach an applied programming class. Hence the language choices. I want to get people productive as soon as possible.

I have always wanted to learn programming. I'm very interested.

Gophering said:

Now, I really don't want to start a language flame war here, so keep in mind that all is IMHO.
Tbh, I could go on and on about PHP's bad points (there are of course some positives though), however it all boils down to very, very bad design... It teaches bad habits. I'll give you this link instead, will probably do a much better job of explaining this http://webonastick.com/php.html (be sure to scroll down to the "Other Anti-PHP sites" and take a look at them as well).



C would be quite a terrible alternative honestly. I don't want to spend time teaching memory management and how to handle strings... Also, I want a language that is cross-platform by default. I've had some trouble with Mono in the past and wouldn't really go back (things might have changed of course). .Net developing on anything other than Win is also a pretty terrible experience from my point of view... In general I'd like to present a scripting language and a compiled language in this course, both Python and Go fit this role really well.

Also, I don't think I expressed the "abstraction" part well enough. Go for example offers plenty of abstraction. You can write a static-file server in about 15 lines of code. A full fledged Google scraper in about a 70-100, so the abstraction is there. However, there's no magic involved here. The minute you look at some code you'll understand what it is doing (provided you are familiar with the syntax). So what I really meant is taking a less "Magical" language.

I agree with you on Pascal. However pascal fails at other points in my list, being practical right out of the box and providing modern libraries.
Not really sure where you got the asm idea from... Assembly would be pretty ridiculous considering all of my points above.

So consider that I don't want to teach a general programming class you got books for that, I want to teach an applied programming class. Hence the language choices. I want to get people productive as soon as possible.

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Old assembly programmer from the 8080 and 6502 days. The C came from you not wanting to address abstraction. Go I know nothing about. Ditto with Python. C# for two reasons, Google and the GSA, and servers moving more towards Windows on a commercial level.

Yeah as I've mentioned, I should probably edit my original post. I'm all for abstraction as long as there's no magic involved (should be apparent from my language choices, Python and Go offer plenty of abstraction). Care to elaborate on your Google + C# point and how this is related to blackhat programming? No disrespect or anything intended, I'm genuinely wondering. I'd also disagree with your "servers moving more towards Windows on a commercial level" statement too. I'm also not sure how this is related to what I'm planning to teach. But we can agree to disagree here.

Thanks for your input.

I have no programming background but I would like to learn.

Can someone PM virtualc08 and tell him to PM me?

virtualc08 said:

I have always looked for someone who would teach me something like this. I would be definitely interested in this! i was actually considering going to some programming class but the classes here suck, they dont tech you they just ask you to "study". Consider me as a highly interested candidate. Please keep this thread posted

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