Automated Link Building is obviously one of the key tools of a BlackHat SEO. Most people don’t define the different types, but I figure I could do a little cheat sheet on the types and then go into a little more complexity on how they work, and how serious they could be. There’s obviously the basics like referral spam, comment spam and trackback spam. One that not many people talk about is creation spam. This probably goes by a different term for each person, but I usually call it that – even back when I was running the blog Rephraser.

Referral Spam is the art of getting a link from a site that lists the most recent referrers. This could be from sites that just put them on the sidebar, or even AWStat / Webalizer stat pages. Here’s a few little fun ones for you all to look at … here’s a few .edu links for you all (you have to sort them obviously – 226 at the time of this post) .edu links – and here’s a few .gov (once again, manually look at each one – 11 at the time of this post …) .gov links. I highly suggest you think about these footprints before actually using them. I am giving you these for research only (obviously), and I won’t be held responsible for your actions if you do use them. Referral spam for these types of links is simply just hit the URL over and over and over again with your URL as the referrer. Most of them will give you a link back if you’re in the top ~10. Not to shabby, huh? This method usually does -not- require multiple proxies to work.

Comment Spam is the next method and is obviously a little more known. It’s leaving comments on blogs, guestbooks, etc with your anchor and url in there somewhere creating a link. Usually this is great on wordpress blogs that DO NOT have Akismet (props to you guys – wish I met you in Vegas! ). This is all of those beautiful comments talking about cialias and online dating in the same comment, conveniently linking. Also a lot of comment spammers now a days use a method called seeding (much like email seeding) in which they post with specific keywords and strings and then scrape the Goog results for which sites index’d them – and then blast those all at once because it’s almost a guarantee’d link drop. This is great for the 10,000 links in a hour type blast. The two factors that people need to think about with link blasts are not only IP addresses, but destination URL’s as well. Most people don’t think that it’s throttled by URL, but sometimes it is. Keep an eye out.

Trackback Spam is my personal favorite. TB spam usually gets through a lot more, and I’ve never seen a trackback request be captcha’d. The one thing I’ve seen to stop it is the “is the site actually linking to us” plugin, which is easily circumvented via a closed hidden div with every URL of every link drop. After drops are in, remove URL’s – easy circumvention and won’t affect the user’s experience. This is also a nice little thing to do with Splog Ping Crawl if you’re up for the modification, modify it so it’s in a drop down so to the user it’s hidden but in Google’s eyes it’s not blackhat because it’s not cloaked, and it’s not taking up your users experience. Great way to help keep it whitehat but still get blackhat results. Zing!

Creation Spam is one of my up and coming techniques that actually works a lot better with trackback spam filtered in, but it’s basically a way to fast-track Eli’s Keyword Real Estate. My definition of creation spam is signing up for a blog, free hosting, whatever – and posting a full site with content and links to another one of your sites. The goal is to make this look at whitehat as possible. We’re talking about a YACG type site with just Wikipedia scrape, copied content, and links to your sites. The reason behind this is when you combind this with Trackback Spam – you have a great way to filter and cycle your link farms. Throw 1000 links at once of these bad boys, and then have your site linked off from it with 2-3 keyword-optimized links and you’ll be passing juice “legitly” in no time. The best example of this is to have a whitehat ecommerce site, we’re talking about 600K product pages on a 2-3 year old aged domain. Use creation spam for around 100 sites, drop 1000 links to each (total 100,000 link juice to site – theoretically, obviously) and then maybe throw in a 100 social bookmarking and 2000 directory submission on the main domain as well for some cover. This results in a good flow of juice to the site, easily covered by other sites, and should keep you afloat for a while. For me, I usually use these 4-5 levels deep (1000 creation spam sites to 100 to 10 to 1) etc.

Now comes the real fun part. Let’s talk about scaling out. Usually personal link spam programs do one site at a time, maybe a list of a few hundred sites. My personal arsenal has the rate of around 3000-4000 sites/minute if the list is pre-determined. This means – best case scenario – 4000 links per minute. This doesn’t mean 4000 to one site, but I can split them however I want. The way I have this coded is I optimized the web classes, threw in multi-threading, and database caching with fast RPM drives. I try to keep it as fast as possible. Then I went ahead and made it work with multiple boxes. I can do 10 dedicated servers, each doing 4000 a minute – that’s 40,000 sites/minute combined. Talk about some nice links huh?

Another scale that most people don’t consider much anymore is forums. This is obviously due to the XRumer spam (which I must admit, I like ) and a lot of speculation that forum backlinks are de-valued as a result of it. Don’t count them out completely though – they can still be used to cover up link spam in the backlink overview tools like linkdomain on Yahoo. This should keep prying eyes away from your actual links that help you do some damage. Just because they’re penalized doesn’t mean they won’t help. Keep that in mind. After all – a link is a link.

Now most people will tell you that I go overboard with my operation – but as most of you already know, I like to be very effusive. My current setup allows me to scale almost infinitely. Currently I run a network of spider boxes and hub boxes, that just keep looking for new links day in and day out. As I said above the 3000-4000 a minute is a true number – but what I didn’t mention is that’s per box. Just to give you an idea of what can be achieved, yes – I do have a network like this running and mainly I use it for research and of course because I find it fun. Don’t think that all blackhats are limited by out of box applications. This is completely coded from scratch across a programming language, a scripting language and of course I use MySQL for the database portion.

I just wanted to throw that in there to help put in perspective what’s actually possible. I hope you all enjoyed the read, and I know a lot of you were on my ass about a new post – I hope you think this was worth the wait! Feel free to use the Request Post link to request any upcoming posts and/or give me ideas for future posts, maybe I’ll get a few more out soon.