Blackhat Explained

I just want to clear something up that most people are not understanding. BlackHat SEO is not taking shortcuts. Most of the people that talk about BlackHat SEO in such connotation usually have never done it themselves, or even seen the code behind one of the tools. Ok, I’ll admit that the newbie-ish BH tools [...]

I just want to clear something up that most people are not understanding. BlackHat SEO is not taking shortcuts. Most of the people that talk about BlackHat SEO in such connotation usually have never done it themselves, or even seen the code behind one of the tools.

Ok, I’ll admit that the newbie-ish BH tools like pre-made doorway pages, etc are pretty lame. Those are shortcuts. Those are people that really have no idea what they’re doing on a grander scale with writing their own code. The whole point of doing BlackHat SEO correctly is that when someone looks at your page and/or site they can’t go “this looks blackhat”. They will look at the page and it will appear to look whitehat on the surface.

Let’s look at the reality. If BlackHats only were for shortcuts, the methods and techniques would be completely dead by now. Automation is key. How you go about your automation, is the lock. Anyone can have the key to their success, but how many put it in the right lock and turn? That really sounded like a “how to make money online” eBook and I apologize, but I’m sure you get my point.

The whole reality is – if you’re one of those people that states that BlackHat SEO is taking shortcuts – I invite you to try it out for yourself. After you take 8-9 hours writing a scraper to correctly parse results, 4-5 hours to learn how to make a good automated link spammer and countless other hours learning other details – get back to me regarding how much of a “shortcut” it is. The whole point of being an automated-based BlackHat SEO is to create a system that will reap long term benefits and/or short term massive benefits. That’s just of course my opinion on it.

Heck, I’m just ranting – but you know what. Sometimes it just gets me wiled up when I hear about some people saying such things. Anyway, I’m in the Fort Lauderdale airport writing this waiting for Dave from ScarySEO to pick me up – so my apologies for rambling.

On another note, updated stats for the EPN Redundancy experiment:

People sent to eBay: 308

One:
Blogs: 972
Total Posts: 67771

Two:
Blogs: 971
Total Posts: 92829

Three:
Blogs: 971
Total Posts: 78160

Four:
Blogs: 971
Total Posts: 49771

Going along quite nicely. Only crashed the Dual Xeon about ~15 times now. SoftLayer, you ROCK!

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Well it’s about that time. Here’s a few raw stats from my stats page so far (across all of these only about 2-3 domains are indexed): People sent to eBay: 204 …in the last day: 14 One: Blogs: 972 Total Posts: 56070 Two: Blogs: 971 Total Posts: 66630 Three: Blogs: 971 Total Posts: 52186 Four: [...]

Well it’s about that time. Here’s a few raw stats from my stats page so far (across all of these only about 2-3 domains are indexed):

People sent to eBay: 204
…in the last day: 14

One:
Blogs: 972
Total Posts: 56070

Two:
Blogs: 971
Total Posts: 66630

Three:
Blogs: 971
Total Posts: 52186

Four:
Blogs: 971
Total Posts: 34251

Those are the beginning ones. I’m adding a few more things such as keyword mutation and multiplication. So far with only 4 domains being indexed, and the only index is the root page – the “to EPN” stats are nice. Before anyone asks, that’s AFTER I filtered out the Spiders, automated clicks, etc. I’m assuming most of this traffic has come from the ping services when I did a single pingout themselves. I guess we’ll see. I’m going to most likely do one more in a day or two and see what happens.

The content generation alone has already crashed my dual xeon twice (and yes, everything’s optimized – Dual 2.0 Xeon with 4 GB RAM / Dual 250 GB SATA II’s). My average transit usage per day is 100 GB. This should most likely bring me to around 3 TB by the end of the month, so most likely I’ll throttle it back a little so I don’t get about $2000 in transit overages.

Anyway, this is just the first update. I’ll update this more as time goes along. By the way, already $30 more spiked into EPN than average over the last 2 days. Guess it’s working so far.

I’ll be updating this more as I’m down in Scary SEO with the CMC crew. Until then – automation is key kids. And if the key is turned right, you’ll see results.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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As you do research into the realm of BlackHat SEO you’ll often read a lot of articles and/or content about spam blogs. Here’s the skinny on exactly how that works (at least for my empire). Each of my projects will change on a day to day basis on how it works. One day I may [...]

As you do research into the realm of BlackHat SEO you’ll often read a lot of articles and/or content about spam blogs. Here’s the skinny on exactly how that works (at least for my empire). Each of my projects will change on a day to day basis on how it works. One day I may be massively spamming WPMU blogs with XMLRPC, and the next uploading post content with a delay for the next 5 years. It all depends on the mood I’m currently in. This is one of my bread and butter ideas that not a lot of people will use, but should.

With this technique you’ll be able to blast out backlinks for whatever you want on a hourly basis, and make sure to distribute it across multiple Class C IP’s for your use later on. I’m assuming that if you’re reading this you’re at least somewhat familiar with what a spam blog is, and you’re decently familiar with what an RSS feed is. These will be the basis for this technique that I’m about to explain. The best feature about this technique is that people running these blog networks should have no idea that you’re doing anything bad at all. The CPU load won’t spike, ram usage won’t increase, nothing. And on top of that, you have 100% control without releasing any source code.

So what exactly am I talking about? I’m talking about instead of using a plugin such as FeedWordPress with some Markov in it, you use just straight FeedWordPress and skip the middleman – you modify the feed itself. This way whenever the feed gets a hit you can Markov a few articles up and serve them out. Yes, this would use your resources a little more – however with this you can put this into the first article for a day or two: “I really like <LINK>RC cars</LINK>” and then you have backlinks across an entire blog farm. Or even down the ratio, every other link you do it. If you base it on referrer and/or IP address you can make sure one blog doesn’t post more than one link, or sublet it out to certain farms within your control.

The whole point to using your own feed as the source is the fact that to the administrator of these free blog hosts, you’ll appear to be a normal user. Doing your normal calls here and there for importing feed items. You’ll get unique content. You’ll drive traffic. They’ll love you! All the meanwhile you’ll really also be making your own money inserting links and link strength across thousands of sites.

Anyway, that’s my little tip of the night. Wanted to test out my new iMac with a little type-o-thon. Hope you all enjoyed the read.

(4 votes, average: 3.25 out of 5)

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The EPN Redundancy Experiment is a half case study, half test of the “scraper sites” method. I’ll be launching roughly 70,000 blogs which are each completely automated to see what kind of results I can bring in via EPN. All of these blogs are 100% link-spam free, no cloaking/cookie stuffing, and points the visitor directly [...]

The EPN Redundancy Experiment is a half case study, half test of the “scraper sites” method. I’ll be launching roughly 70,000 blogs which are each completely automated to see what kind of results I can bring in via EPN. All of these blogs are 100% link-spam free, no cloaking/cookie stuffing, and points the visitor directly to the product they were looking for. In other words, these are an A+ on the scale for “user experience”.

The goal for this will be I want other domains to pick up the slack when the earlier ones go down. The main achievement I’m going to attempt to achieve will be “rolling commissions”. This means when the sites are penalized (if they do get penalized) and go from 300-400 uniques/day to <100, I want another domain to step up index wise and take over. For this redundancy experiment I’ve chosen to use a number of domains under 10, but each will contain roughly 1000 sub domains that all have automatic content updates & product pushes.

This will be an experiment to see how much in commission I can receive by the 30th of next month. Let the fun begin!

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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A lot of people often correspond the Ebay Partner Network and Blackhat as being a cookie stuffer. That’s true in some cases, but not in mine. I’ve been doing some smaller studies and seeing what kind of damage I can do with EPN, and now that I’ve hit $1000 I figure I should report how [...]

A lot of people often correspond the Ebay Partner Network and Blackhat as being a cookie stuffer. That’s true in some cases, but not in mine.

I’ve been doing some smaller studies and seeing what kind of damage I can do with EPN, and now that I’ve hit $1000 I figure I should report how I did it and more importantly, my response to the “random terminations” that EPN has been doing (in my opinion).

As of right now here are my stats “all time” and I will round to the closest logical number to make it easier to understand.

Clicks: ~13100
EPC: ~$7.95
Earnings: ~$1000

These are not exact results obviously, but here’s the funny thing. I hold a high EPC, I don’t cookie stuff what-so-ever and all of my visitors go to the products that they’re looking for. That’s my whole reasoning for me not being terminated from EPN so far. There were some days where I had 300-400 uniques a day, per site and I was running maybe 3-4 sites. I’m about to scale this out to about 700 and see what kind of numbers I can run with that. We’ll call that the “followup EPN & Blackhat casestudy”. This is not using any link spam what-so-ever and also no cloaking. The methods for the content itself is actually whitehat so it’s very hard to consider this blackhat at all. The only reason I am, is due to the fact that the sites DO get penalized due to … I’m assuming “lack of good quality content”.

There’s a good detail to that, though. They may be penalized, but instead of pulling 300-400 uniques a day they still pull 30-50 uniques a day per domain. So my assumption is that with 700 of them running, even when penalized, I’ll be able to keep up with around 21,000 uniques/day lowball and 35,000 highball. Obviously this is a goal to shoot for, but the actual reasoning behind dictates probably higher penalties and problems trying to scale. I guess we’ll find out just how much it will, assuming I don’t kick the crap out of my server and send it into a million pieces and/or start a datacenter fire.

My costs for this case study were low. A total of $50 was spent. Yes, you heard me right, $50 was spent and over $1000 return. The timeframe for this was really thrown off, I would work a little on it then let it sit. Total time invested in this was about 4-5 hours. 5 hours and $1000 later, that’s not bad for $200 an hour. A total of 4 domains were used, and I have 7 sitting which I’m going to use for this next test.

The method behind this is obviously a win/win situation.

For EPN

• I provide high-converting traffic
• I don’t cookie stuff
• I provide volume
• I provide sales
• There’s no reason for them to terminate me.

For Me

• Low Time Invested
• Low Money Invested
• Big Profit Potential When Scaled

Now, to address the “random EPN terminations” I believe that they have an algorithm on the backend that runs every now and again (like the Google slaps) that calculates both your EPC, conversions, and more importantly in/out keyword purchase ratio. Every time I read about someone that got terminated they were doing whitehat and legit things (with the exception of a few, obviously). What I think happens is that EPN tracks the keyword that the user came in on, and compares that with what they buy. If the user buys something later on that isn’t related to that product (to be safe lets say the same product category) – you get flagged. This will not happen due to one person of course, but lets say if 40%+ of your ‘sales’ are from unrelated searches, you get a ‘termination’.

This is just my take on it, but it does explain why I can keep on with my account and consistently provide traffic and make money – and some white hats have been terminated. But of course, this is my opinion and I can’t confirm it what so ever.

Hope you enjoyed the read.

(6 votes, average: 4.83 out of 5)

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When BlueHatSEO released their Ping Crawl WordPress plugin, let me tell you – it looked perfect for the case study I was about to do. The only problem I could see was the number of backlinks it would generate would be too many too fast, especially for a smaller network. So my first task was [...]

When BlueHatSEO released their Ping Crawl WordPress plugin, let me tell you – it looked perfect for the case study I was about to do. The only problem I could see was the number of backlinks it would generate would be too many too fast, especially for a smaller network. So my first task was I needed to take down the number of backlinks per post. I decided 1 per post would be good to just continually add automated backlinks on for a little while.

Next I decided that 1 per post was too many, considering the fact that I would be generating almost 1500 pages of content a day. 1500 backlinks per day to a blog that is pretty much completely crap… that wouldn’t be too good, now would it? I decided to take the trackback posts down to a frequency of one in five. Aka 1 out of every 5 posts would get 1 link (theoretically – do a search in the code for “rand” and you’ll find it).

Oh, and of course to make the plugin a little more automated friendly, it fetches those trackback links based on your TITLE, not your tags. The main reason I wanted this change was I wanted to use it for not only with my custom splogs, but I wanted to try it also with my Datapresser account.

So without further hesitation, here’s the code (and of course you’re not required to give me anything for the modifications, but I don’t mind a backlink or two. )

Splog Ping Crawl Modification

(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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One of the concepts that I keep telling people when they talk to me is links aren’t everything. Don’t get me wrong though, links are a very important factor in ranking for terms. The main point that I try to stress (and Whitehat’s always stress this obviously) is that content is king. So I did [...]

One of the concepts that I keep telling people when they talk to me is links aren’t everything. Don’t get me wrong though, links are a very important factor in ranking for terms. The main point that I try to stress (and Whitehat’s always stress this obviously) is that content is king. So I did a few case studies and did some attempts. Let’s go over some figures and see what really makes sense based on a case study I did this month. I ran 5 spam blogs with not one ounce of hand written content, and added 30 links to each. The content is all generated via keyword scraping & reposting using EPN (eBay partner network). I also had a friend do a regular phpBay site. At the end of the month he made $300 and a few hours of work (including domain, redesign, content, and linking). He paid $20 for social submissions & $8 for the domain, I paid $8 per domain for 5 domains for $40, but made $600 by the end of the month from 1 hour worth of work.

I could have made almost the same using one domain and just using orphaned sub-domains, but I decided separate domains were a good way to study it. So, what was the difference and how did I make more? Was it the links? Was it the multiple sites? Or was it the fact that for every page of content on his phpBay site I had 1000 pages of my own?

It was a mix of everything, but links was not one of the factors. I was raking in on longtails across 150-300 different unique terms every day while he got 100-150 uniques a day from one term (and that’s not bad for only $20 worth of social submissions!). He targeted one niche, I targeted thousands. As important as content is, so is redundancy and dedication. One main factor that plays a big role in long term blackhat income with this method is the fact that all 5 of my sites were sandboxed down and almost banned after the month, but are still getting traffic today. But now instead of each site getting 150-300 a piece, they get that combined. It’s still not bad, but it’s not near the same amount of income anymore.

The life expectancy of his phpBay site is certainly longer than my little 5 site network, however if I did the same amount of time put into mine as he did, I would have actually had 25 sites by the time his 1 was finished – and earned roughly $3000 (theoretically). Just keep in mind that your content and terms are what makes the income, not necessarily just links.

Going to do another few case studies over the next two or three weeks, I’ll post the results to see what you all think. As always the Request a Post page is up, leave a comment if you have any requests or questions regarding something I haven’t mentioned yet.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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I know one of the biggest challenges with my splogs when I ran a smaller network (when I say smaller I’m talking under 1500) was keeping the content to stay with the times. Running a blog on “Brittany Spears” only worked for a while until Lindsay Lohan took the lime light. This method would actually [...]

I know one of the biggest challenges with my splogs when I ran a smaller network (when I say smaller I’m talking under 1500) was keeping the content to stay with the times. Running a blog on “Brittany Spears” only worked for a while until Lindsay Lohan took the lime light. This method would actually keep my content on the blog current with keywords, but not sidetrack it from the original concept. So here’s the “situation” I’ll be running through. Let’s say you’re just starting with Blackhat SEO and you decide to give a markov-based blog farm a try. Your goal is not to just generate links like everyone else usually does, but cloak all visitors from search engines to one of your CPA (Cost Per Action) based landing pages.

Your goals for this first farm to get your feet wet is simple. Cloak content to the search engines, and foward all SERP based hits to the landing page to try to convert to a lead. But there’s a kicker: where will you come up with these topics? What about the content and monetization? This is where good ol’ Google comes in. Google has a nice little tool called Google BlogSearch and they were nice enough to allow output to RSS feeds. Lucky for us RSS is the format that our blog farm will use to get the content and input it into our blogs. This is broken down into three different stages of operation from start to finish.

1. Content – The content is controlled by GBS (Google BlogSearch) and is given as original work. This is not unique what so ever, and will be seen as duplicate content in the SE’s (Search Engines) unless you either add more content to it or change the structuring and use synonyms using Markov and the like. This is where the plugins come in that will handle all of this for you. First off, grab a copy of Eli’s zipped wordpress install that’s mentioned in his SEO Empire post. To find it, you’ll have to read it (hint: look for “wordpress I compiled”). This one has a feature I didn’t want though, which was post trackbacks to each URL. It also doesn’t morph the content, but I’ve given you the keyword to help you out which is markov. Then look at GBS for your link (for example, heres the url for blue widgets). This is the feed you’ll want to use.
2. Hosting – You’ll either need to find free hosting or purchase some, I highly suggest you keep the number of results on the GBS feed low – in fact, probably under 20. Your blog will grow slower, but at the same time it will grow more consistently. This will also help you keep under the radar with your host, and if you’re not in their head about running their CPU through the roof the complaints may be easier to handle if you receive any.
3. Linking – This is up to your imagination. If you keep the trackback feature in Eli’s install, taken care of. Personally I would throttle that back to 1 in 100ish so that you don’t get too many backlinks too fast. The goal of these sites is to get the content indexed over time so it doesn’t raise any red flags.
4. Monetization – If you’re cloaking you also need to get another plugin to read off the referrer and/or IP address and cloak the correct content to the SE’s and display a landing page to users. This I’m leaving out there for you to figure out on your own. To get you pointed in the right direction, try looking up PHP scripts that have the variable $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']. This is a very dated way to do it, but it will get the job done 9 out of 10 times and won’t take that long to setup. Other ways to monetize are obviously adsense (which I HIGHLY discourage) and CPA (which I highly suggest). If you haven’t started with CPA you should signup as soon as possible and take a look around. Use the A4D square advert on the right, they have some great offers for traffic like this.

So now that this is taken care of, the content read from GBS will automatically also take other titles and content as the other blogs in the niche are updated. Using the brittany spears example this could give a few of your farms posts such as “Brittany Spears vs Lindsay Lohan” or “Brittany Spears and K Fed”. The whole point of the GBS is not just unique content from multiple sites, but also to increase your traffic as much as possible without setting off any alarms.

Just figured I would throw this out there for anyone interested in trying to get started, and yes these methods still work; I’m using them right now. If this is too basic for you, feel free to say so, I’m taking suggestions for future post ideas and concepts.

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Leave a comment on this post with what you’d like to see written about, and I’ll see what I can do.

Leave a comment on this post with what you’d like to see written about, and I’ll see what I can do.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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